Of Kings and Killers

by Will Wight

  “Am I so similar to you?” Calder asked. “That’s…perhaps the worst thing I can imagine.”

  From the outside, the Emperor’s Intent looked like a more mature, fleshed-out version of Calder’s. Like the Emperor was a living human being while Calder was just a skeleton.

  “Really? You should be flattered.”

  “I should have listened to my tutors. ‘The wisest king is the humblest servant of his people.’”

  “Sadesthenes.” The Emperor gave a small, fond smile. “It’s been a long time since I used that name.”

  A moment passed before Calder realized what he meant.

  Another passed as he digested it.

  But he couldn’t accept it. “…Sadesthenes was the self-educated son of a wine merchant!”

  “A false persona lives or dies in the personal details.”

  “He criticized you for years!”

  “I have long been aware of my weaknesses. Alas, awareness of one’s flaws is not the same as overcoming them.”

  Calder could feel the Emperor’s honesty. It shook him.

  And it gave him an opening.

  “Then let’s overcome them together,” Calder said.

  Kelarac was gone, but at least Nakothi was still out there. Perhaps the others as well. Ozriel was poised to destroy the entire world.

  If Calder was willing to give his life, how could he refuse to work with the Emperor?

  The Emperor considered for a moment, and Calder could feel the man considering all possibilities. Even his echo was a force to be reckoned with, and Calder’s well-seasoned hatred was tempered by the realization of how powerful the man truly was.

  Then he disappeared.

  He had made the same choice.

  Calder and the Emperor woke in the same body. As one, they sank down into the Optasia.

  But while the Emperor focused his attention through the device, Calder allowed himself a moment to smile.

  He had taken in the Intent of the most powerful Reader of all time without thought of what it would do to him. He was giving up his life, his future, and his identity for his subjects.

  For the first time, he really felt like a king.

  Then the Optasia took over, and he crashed into the Great Elders like a ship crashing full-speed into a cliff.

  The Great Elders are awake.

  They have not returned to full strength, but still they scramble at the opportunity to leave the world in which they are imprisoned.

  Kthanikahr is decay. The impermanence of flesh. Calder wants to scream, wants to tear himself out of the rotting flesh-suit in which he is trapped. He almost loses himself in the pure, simple mind of a worm.

  Othaghor is worse.

  He is endless, disgusting biology, a cycle of breeding and consumption and mutation that sickens him. A human is nothing more than a puppet of meat and nerves, a puppet that could so easily be improved.

  Nakothi is the third point of a triangle, blurring the lines between life and death until the very logic of Calder’s thoughts unravels.

  The Emperor’s remaining Intent is no more suited to this than Calder’s. He had given his life rather than use the Optasia again, and his echo is certainly no match for the Great Elders.

  But he and Calder are together.

  Even as they forget their own identities, they can remind each other of their shared purpose: they need to fix the sky.

  They see Ozriel. He wears his black armor, pale hair streaming behind him. His scythe crackles against a blue membrane over their reality, and the shield that protects existence is ready to break at any second.

  There is great significance to that action, much to learn, but they can’t recognize it. They are blind to everything but their purpose. All other thoughts are sacrificed at the altar of focus.

  The cracks in the sky aren’t really “cracks.” They are rifts held open by the power of the Great Elders.

  Calder follows threads of power down to the three awakened Great Elders.

  No…the two.

  Nakothi’s thread is a shadow of its former self, fading from existence. It remains at all because she always exists in that incomprehensible state between life and death.

  Calder focuses on the two other threads, the power of Othaghor and Kthanikahr. They tremble to hold the void open, and he senses desperation in that action.

  He doesn’t remember why he’s doing this. He doesn’t even remember who “Calder” is.

  But he knows those threads must break.

  Nothing else in the world matters but the threads.

  They must break.

  His awareness spreads to the statues, hundreds of statues, all across the world at once. He sees through all their eyes and his thoughts splinter further.

  He knows only when the statues explode, overloaded beyond their original purpose.

  The threads snap.

  The rifts fade.

  The sky returns.

  The sky…

  He lies on his back in the middle of a destroyed room. His body is filled with pain and he is trapped in twisted metal, but he stares up at the sky.

  His remaining thoughts drift upwards, into the endless blue.

  Epilogue

  one year later

  “…and that’s how I survived,” Foster said to the group of dockside children. “If not for my beard, I would never have made it.”

  He sat on the ground against a fence, his wooden peg leg crossed over his remaining leg of flesh.

  Andel watched him and shook his head.

  His story changed every time, but it never failed to draw a crowd. After all, only a relative handful had participated in the battle against Kelarac, so the survivors had guaranteed celebrity status. Especially those, like Foster, who had clear battle-wounds.

  There were now several names for that battle. The news-sheets had called it the Second Elder War for a while, but as the first Elder War had gone on for decades, that name hadn’t stuck. Others called it Kelarac’s War or the Battle of Candle Bay, though it hadn’t taken place anywhere close to the bay.

  Andel preferred the Last Battle of the Empire.

  After the sky had returned, the three Regents had officially declared the end of the Aurelian Empire. Their new government, the optimistically named Aurelian Alliance, was pushing its way through a host of new problems.

  It was effectively a loose agreement between the regional governors and the Guilds, so to no one’s surprise, the jockeying for power had begun immediately.

  That was the problem with not having a single, centralized source of authority.

  Andel shook his head as he loaded another box aboard his ship. He couldn’t imagine what the Regents were thinking.

  They must have some sort of plan, but to him, the Alliance seemed doomed to fail.

  “Why didn’t…Kelarac…kill you?” one older child asked, still whispering the Great Elder’s name.

  With his voice grave, Foster launched into a completely outlandish explanation, but it was a good question.

  Andel and Foster had spent many nights in speculation on that very topic. They had even consulted Magisters and done some research themselves.

  None of it gave them a conclusive answer.

  How he had really survived was actually very simple: when he lost consciousness, his Soulbound Vessel had taken over.

  His tools had pulled him from the surface of the Aion Sea and cobbled together a raft for him, keeping him afloat and alive until help arrived. It was a shocking story of the independence that Awakened objects could demonstrate, and Andel was almost willing to leave it at that.

  Almost.

  But when Urg’naut had possessed a human body, he had erased ten percent of the Capital and several miles of ocean in a blink.

  Some researchers studying the Last Battle of the Empire claimed that Kelarac didn’t obliterate the entire fleet because of the suppressive effect of Bastion’s Veil combined with Andel’s own Beacon. Those powers, combined with the energy it mu
st have taken to animate the statues and battle the Regents, had left him weakened to an almost human level.

  Still others suggested that Kelarac had never used the same destructive force as Urg’naut, even in the Elder War. Force had never been his tactic of choice.

  Sometimes Andel leaned toward one explanation, sometimes another. But scholars also suggested that the human manifestation of a Great Elder was a blend between the Elder and the human host. And Kelarac had attacked both Andel and Foster with her Soulbound power, and both times failed to kill them.

  Maybe Jerri had been holding back.

  Andel shook himself and returned to work. More likely, that was just wishful thinking. Kelarac had effectively been fighting all three Regents at the same time, and he had expressed a desire to keep Calder and the crew as toys.

  Pointless to stay stuck on questions that couldn’t be answered.

  He had grabbed another box when he saw that Petal had joined the crowd around Foster. Walking up to her, he nudged her with the toe of his shoe.

  “Do you want to miss the tide?”

  Petal hid behind her hair to avoid meeting his eyes, but she pointed to the porters Andel had hired. “That’s their job.”

  She wasn’t wrong.

  She sighed and stood up to join him anyway. It wasn’t as though her help was necessary, but it would be good exercise for her. And each second they delayed was a second wasted, in Andel’s mind.

  He just wanted to be gone. The Capital didn’t feel like home anymore.

  He wanted to be on deck with waves all around him.

  Cheska Bennett had offered all three of them positions with another Navigator crew, but they had refused. Somehow, it just felt wrong.

  Instead, they had used the reward money they had received for their participation in the Last Battle to hire a crew and buy a ship of their own. Not a Navigator ship—this one would be limited to the shallow Aion.

  They called it The Woodsman.

  It had been a long time.

  Shuffles did not feel time in the same way that the humans did, but it knew what a long time was.

  The humans kept it in a covered cage in the same room as its pet human. But its pet human hadn’t moved since the day the Great One ended.

  Shuffles was growing impatient. A pet that never moved was no fun.

  A frightening human was in the room now. A human who carried around a piece of a Great One.

  “I have found more cases in which the subject emerges from a coma,” the frightening human said. “So you see, there is evidence.”

  “Maybe, Guild Head, maybe! If the Emperor wills it so. But there are thirty cases where they don’t for every one where they do,” an uninteresting human responded.

  “One in thirty are not terrible odds. Though I suppose it depends on how many tries you get, doesn’t it?”

  “I…suppose so.” The uninteresting human smelled confused, but uninteresting humans often did.

  “My shift is now up. I will return for tomorrow’s shift.”

  “I must protest again, Guild Head. I will send for you the instant anything changes, but we have no reason to expect that. There is no need for your shifts.”

  “By tomorrow’s shift,” the frightening human continued, “I will have found another reason to believe he will awaken.”

  The frightening human left. The uninteresting human stayed a little longer, fed Shuffles some boring fish, and then left.

  Shuffles tasted the meaning of their words and selected the one it liked the best.

  With the tentacles on its mouth, it reached through the bars and unlatched the cage. It could do this at any time, but the humans seemed not to realize it.

  It hopped down from its cage, fluttering over to where its pet human lay unresponsive on the bed. Its eyes staring unseeing. Occasionally blinking.

  The pet human did not smell like itself. It smelled like it had gone a long way away, even though it was right here.

  Shuffles had waited for too long. Now it had the right word to bring the human back.

  It held the word, savoring it, until it had built up enough power.

  Then Shuffles bellowed, “AWAKEN.”

  The human’s fingers twitched.

  THE END

  of The Elder Empire, Last Sea

  Of Kings and Killers

  Bloopers

  In the stained-glass room floating in the void, Ozriel leaned back on his couch.

  “I can tell you the three ways to be rid of the creatures you call Great Elders. You should listen well, Lindon.”

  Calder blinked. “My name isn’t Lindon.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No.”

  Ozriel swallowed hard. “Oh no…I’m in the wrong world.”

  Calder spun back to help Andel...just in time to see the frog-like Elder swallow his quartermaster whole.

  Calder let out a breath of relief and sheathed his cutlass.

  Jerri hurried up and grabbed his arm. “What are you doing? We have to rescue Andel before he dies!”

  “No, Andel’s fine. He was swallowed whole. Nobody who gets swallowed whole ever dies. Now, if he’d fallen off a cliff into a never-ending abyss, then I might have been worried.”

  Long ago, a tutor for the Alchemist Guild walked into a cell where a disturbing little girl was stacking up bones like blocks.

  The girl was pale. Creepy. She didn’t blink enough.

  The tutor immediately decided to skip the day’s lesson. He could report to Bareius that everything had gone perfectly, and no one would ever know that he’d shirked his duties.

  He glanced at his lesson plan. Why did anyone need an entire lesson on personal boundaries?

  The tutor tossed the lesson plan into the trash bin.

  Twenty years later, Calder Marten threw open his bedroom wardrobe.

  To find Bliss staring at him from inside.

  “He is not controlled,” Loreli said. “I am certain. I have thoroughly Read him, his ship, his crew, and his possessions. I will vouch that he is not a puppet, only a fool. A moron. A chump. A sucker. An idiot, some might call him. Relentlessly selfish, you could say. Shortsighted. Arrogant. Childish, even. There are those who might suggest that his emotional growth was stunted in childhood, and I can’t say I disagree.”

  Estyr released her psychic grip on Calder’s throat, letting him spill to the floor, coughing.

  “If you say so, Loreli, I’ll let him go.”

  Calder waved a hand. “No, never mind. Just…just strangle me.”

  Calder stood and moved to the window. He reached out to see if he could touch the illusion that Kelarac was showing him.

  His hand tapped against the glass.

  Instantly the vision changed. He saw inside a dark room, where a man hunched in front of a brightly lit screen, his fingers working furiously.

  Everything from the clothes the man wore to the decorations in the room were strange to Calder. “What is this?” he asked.

  “I can tell you what it isn’t,” Kelarac responded. “Cradle.”

  Glossary of Terms

  Am’haranai – The ancient order of spies and assassins that would eventually become the Consultant’s Guild. Some formal documents still refer to the Consultant’s Guild in this way.

  Architect – One type of Consultant. The Architects mostly stay in one place, ruling over Guild business and deciding general strategy. They include alchemists, surgeons, Readers, strategists, and specialists of all types.

  Awaken – A Reader can Awaken an object by bringing out its latent powers of Intent. An Awakened object is very powerful, but it gains a measure of self-awareness. Also, it can never be invested again.

  Jarelys Teach, the Head of the Imperial Guard, carries an ancient executioner’s blade that has been Awakened. It now bears the power of all the lives it took, and is lethal even at a distance.

  All Soulbound Vessels are Awakened.

  Children of the Dead Mother – Elderspawn created by the power of
Nakothi out of human corpses.

  Consultant – A member of the Consultants Guild, also known as the Am’haranai. Mercenary spies and covert agents that specialize in gathering and manipulating information for their clients.

  Consultants come in five basic varieties: Architects, Gardeners, Masons, Miners, and Shepherds.

  For more, see the Guild Guide.

  Dead Mother, The – See: Nakothi.

  Elder – Any member of the various races that ruled the world in ancient days, keeping humanity as slaves. The most powerful among them are known as Great Elders, and their lesser are often called Elderspawn.

  Gardener – One type of Consultant. The Gardeners kill people for hire.

  Intent – The power of focused will that all humans possess. Whenever you use an object intentionally, for a specific purpose, you are investing your Intent into that object. The power of your Intent builds up in that object over time, making it better at a given task.

  Every human being uses their Intent, but most people do so blindly; only Readers can sense what they’re doing.

  See also: “Invest,” “Reader.”

  Invest – Besides its usual financial implications, to “invest” means to imbue an object with one’s Intent. By intentionally using an object, you invest that object with a measure of your Intent, which makes it better at performing that specific task.

  So a pair of scissors used by a barber every day for years become progressively better and better at cutting hair. After a few years, the scissors will cut cleanly through even the thickest strands of tangled hair, slicing through with practically no effort. A razor used by a serial killer will become more and more lethal with time. A razor used by a serial-killing barber will be very confused.