Of Dawn and Darkness (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 2) (16 page)

Ordinarily, Calder would have felt the corruption of that murderous blade, but at the moment...he realized he was holding his breath again.

Green fire. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. That was a coincidence that strained all credibility; if he’d seen it in a play, he wouldn’t have believed it.

“What we call coincidence is but the work of plans unknown.”
The philosopher Hestor’s words struck dangerously close to home. If anything was the result of an Elder’s plan, it would be Jerri’s presence here.

But his wife hadn’t died on that island after all.

Calder moved into the doorway and saw her, in the same red prison clothes she’d been wearing the last time. When he’d abandoned her to her fate. She’d launched a ball of flame even before he’d turned the corner, but he slapped it out of the air contemptuously with the flat of his sword.

That was something he would have never attempted, under other conditions; he didn’t understand the Intent in those green fireballs, nor did he fully understand the power in his own sword. Instead of canceling each other out, the effects could just as easily have fed on one another and burned him alive. Besides, Soulbound blasts of fire were invariably
fast
. It was a stupid, unnecessary risk to try swatting one in midair.

This time, he hardly noticed. Jerri stood before him, fire gathering unnoticed in her left hand, eyes as wide as he knew his must be.

“Calder, what are you...what are you doing with the Imperial Guard?”

That actually made him smile, though he wasn’t entirely sure he
felt
like smiling. “I thought you would have guessed. They’re with me. I’m the Emperor now.”

Jerri’s right hand, the one not wreathed in emerald fire, came up to her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears. “You see?
He
told you the truth!”

Calder’s feelings turned sour. Why had she brought
that
up? Now he was lost in the memory of slithering eyes on stalks, and the knowledge that he danced in the palm of an Elder’s hand.

Bliss popped out from behind Calder. “Technically, he’s the Imperial Steward. Sitting on the throne until someone, probably him, can be declared the true Emperor. For that, though, we’re going to need the throne.”

Everything seemed to happen at once.

Jerri focused her gaze on Bliss, anger burning through the lens of her unshed tears. Green fire glowed brighter.

The Head of the Blackwatch rolled out, extending the Spear of Tharlos to its full length. The spear of ancient yellowed bone radiated an Intent that swallowed the room, plucking at Calder with invisible fingers and urging him to change. He had to concentrate on Kelarac’s mark, filling his mind with the borrowed authority of the Soul Collector, to face even that much Elder Intent without losing himself.

Armor clanked as General Teach launched herself into the room. Tyrfang’s red-and-black blade rippled with dark power, and Calder found the breath snatched from his lungs. Utter despair rolled over him like a tide, as though he’d come face-to-face with his own executioner.

Whatever happened next, it happened so quickly that he saw it only in flashes.

Jerri released a flash of green fire and dove to the side, while the Spear of Tharlos struck straight at her. It would have missed the fire entirely, except it seemed to
twist
of its own accord, bending in violation of everything Calder knew about physical mass. It hit the fire straight on...just as Tyrfang’s black edge arrived.

Soon after, when Calder tried to piece the moment together, he couldn’t make it all fit. By rights, Teach should have been five steps farther away than Bliss. They should have been aiming at different points. The fireball should have passed both of them, and they all should have hit only air.

Instead, the power of Jerri’s Vessel met Tyrfang, the Executioner’s Blade and Bliss’ Spear of Tharlos at the same time.

Inches above the flesh-shrouded cage of steel bars that men called the Optasia.

The Intent burned away the Elder flesh surrounding the Emperor’s throne instantly; the heart-like muscle that had kept a grip on the metal dissolved into black powder. The force continued, tearing up floorboards and wall panels, rearranging and shattering furniture.

But the Optasia caught that blend of deadly Intent, accepted it, and sent it out to a thousand relays all around the world.

That was about as much as Calder’s Reader senses caught before they were overwhelmed, and he collapsed on the floor of the Emperor’s bedroom.

~~~

After the strange reaction of the Optasia, Bliss ran for the exit. She didn’t prefer to run—running wasn’t dignified—but sometimes the speed was worth it. Especially in cases of grave danger or medical injury.

There had been an injury here, she knew it. And very possibly some grave danger as well. Tharlos’ spear was contorting in the pocket of her coat, twisting and writhing in silent laughter.

When she pushed open the bronze doors leading from the Emperor’s chambers, she remembered that she didn’t know what she was looking for. The courtyard was a scene from an Elderspawn slaughterhouse, with chunks of rotten grayish flesh lying everywhere. Wounded Imperial Guards limped here and there, gathering up the pieces and dumping them into buckets in case the creature pulled itself together again. She could have told them it wasn’t necessary, but she approved of their cleaning efforts. Hygiene was important.

At first, she saw nothing wrong, and her heart sank even further. If she couldn’t see the damage, that meant the Optasia’s network had carried it somewhere else in the world. She might never discover what the Elders had done until it was too late.

One Guard, a woman with a tail like a peacock, was staring up at the clouds. Her bucket fell from a limp hand, spilling Elderspawn gore onto the ground.

This was what a mystery novel might call a
clue.
Bliss followed the woman’s gaze up, expecting a six-winged Elder with a mouth like a shark’s.

Instead, the sky itself was distorted. A long, winding stripe of twisted
wrongness
, like a river of heat haze or a transparent worm. The air fuzzed and twisted, high overhead, and Bliss almost thought she could hear a distant crackle.

She’d seen corruption like this before. This would only be visible from a certain angle; even as high as it was, no one outside the palace would notice anything wrong. And it would get much worse, very soon.

The sky was going to break.

~~~

When Calder came to, he had a moment of panic. The world was frozen around him, too still and too quiet. Something was wrong.

He tried to roll off his bed and grab the pistol that he knew would be next to him, but his wounds screamed in protest. His head pounded so badly that his vision actually dimmed for a second, and he was forced to lean back against his pillow.

Reader’s burn,
he realized, and as soon as he accepted the truth, reality came flooding back. There was nothing wrong—he was onshore. Aboard
The Testament,
the motion of the boat never stopped, and there was no such thing as silence.

He relaxed and let the pain fade away. Normally, if he’d rolled around like this, he would have woken Jerri immediately. She would be the one to reassure him, to make fun of him for worrying when everything was peaceful.

But she wasn’t here. She would be locked in some secure corner of the palace by now.

So something was wrong after all, just nothing new.

Thoughts of Jerri shook up his memory, reminding him of the afternoon, and he once again tried to sit up. Again, pain convinced him to stay where he was.

What had happened? The Optasia had reacted strangely to the attack...an attack that shouldn’t have landed in the first place. And why was Jerri there, in the Emperor’s chambers, sealed in by an Elder wall that had been there since before she left the Gray Island?

None of that made any sense, so there was only one possibility. An Elder was pulling strings, shaping events directly instead of letting them fall out as they naturally would. Why? He had no idea, and his head hurt too badly for further speculation.

Soft light from a distant quicklamp filtered in around the edges of his window, so it must have been the dead of night. He surrendered himself to the pain, hoping sleep would take him quickly.

Just before he shut his eyes again, the window creaked open, and a man hopped in. He wore his hair long, and in one hand, he carried a dagger in a reverse grip. Fresh blood dripped from the weapon’s tip.

Calder was so shocked that, for a moment, he refused to believe what he was seeing. Not that it was so unusual for someone to try and kill him—that was happening more and more, these days—but that the would-be assassin had come
exactly
when he woke up.

What were the odds? Seconds earlier or later, and he would have seen nothing. Heard nothing. This man would have cut him in half.

Calder gave up questioning his good fortune as his fight instincts kicked in. The killer turned to him, striding confidently over to the bed, flipping his knife in one hand. As he got closer, Calder realized he was humming a jaunty tune.

I have one shot,
Calder thought. He didn’t have time to waste struggling out of bed or fighting against his pain; he had to reach his weapon, and he had to do it in one movement. That was his only chance of survival.

When he’d gathered enough strength, he clenched his jaw against the pain and rolled off the bed.

His assailant caught him and tossed him back. “Whoops, there you go. Up up up.”

The man didn’t seem at all surprised or thrown off by Calder’s escape attempt; in fact, he seemed not to care at all. He pressed lightly on Calder’s chest with one hand, but no matter how Calder struggled, he couldn’t raise his chest an inch. He tried to gather the breath for a scream, but the attacker pushed the air from his lungs. The attacker winked at him and raised the knife.

And a shadow slit his throat with a bronze blade.

Calder had never realized it before, having never seen an assassination from quite this close, but slicing a man’s throat open took quite a bit of strength. The shadow ripped through his neck like a butcher slicing meat, and warm blood showered Calder’s face. And most of the rest of his body too, he supposed. Not that he was in any condition to complain.

He scraped the blood from his eyes, ignoring the pain from his injuries and the insistent hammer-blows of his headache, desperate to see.

When his eyes cleared, he was in for a surprise: the man was still on his feet. His throat was split almost to the spine, but he held it together with one hand. The other smashed back against the black-clad figure behind him.

The killer with the bronze blade flew backward with the force of a cannonball, smashing a crater-sized dent into the wall and falling limply to the floor. Frowning as though the whole mess irritated him, the man with the slit throat collapsed a moment later.

Leaving a blood-soaked Calder alone in his bedroom with two corpses.

“What just happened?” His voice came out in a croak, and of course no one answered him. Gingerly, favoring his newly stressed wounds, he reached out for his cutlass. Whoever had brought him here was also considerate enough to leave his weapon within reach, so he was able to tug the hilt out of its sheath without much trouble.

A second later, he poked at his attacker’s body with the tip of his sword. No movement. Surely he should be dead, given the amount of blood he’d lost, but Calder would have never expected him to continue standing with his head halfway severed. No point in taking chances.

Calder poked him again, harder this time, and almost shrieked as the
other
body groaned and lifted a hand to its head.

Not just one person who survived a blow that should have killed them, but two.
He should take up gambling; clearly the laws of probability were meaningless around him.

The shadow pulled off the black cloth that had surrounded its head, revealing a mess of blond hair. Meia looked up at him, orange eyes flashing with reflected light. “Champions,” she said, with a grimace of distaste. “I’m sorry. I should have been more thorough.”

“I would have thought a slit throat was thorough enough.”
A Champion.
His body chilled as he realized how close he’d come to death. If Meia hadn’t been there...if it had been someone
other
than Meia, the Consultant who could fight Urzaia...

This was far too many coincidences for one day.

Meia hauled herself to her feet. “I’ve never met anyone that could survive that. But let’s be sure, shall we?” She crept over to the man’s body, pulling needles from her pouch.

A poisoned needle went into both thighs and both wrists before she sliced the tendons on the back of each ankle. Calder prided himself on a strong stomach, but he looked away. He’d seen enough for one night.

When she was done, she walked over to the door and opened it a crack, peering out. “The hallway is unguarded. That’s a pity. He killed eight Guards, two Watchmen, and one Magister that I’m aware of.”

Eleven people, killed just to reach a twelfth. This was all too much for Calder to take in at one time. He struggled out of bloody sheets, hobbling over to the wardrobe. He was practically naked in front of Meia, wearing only a pair of shorts, but he couldn’t possibly have cared any less.

“I was going to ask how he got in, but I guess that explains it.” His hands were shaking so badly that he couldn’t open the wardrobe—fear, pain, exhaustion, and the rush of danger combined so that he was surprised his limbs didn’t shake themselves off completely.

Meia moved to the window, closed and bolted it, and then returned to the door. “It’s a good thing it
was
a Champion, in a way. They don’t concern themselves with stealth, they just kill a straight line to their target. As soon as I noticed him, I followed. I would never have seen a Gardener.”

And she wouldn’t have stopped one either, he was sure, but that did bring up an interesting question. “How
did
you notice him? Where were you?”

She spared him a glance, saw that he was frozen in front of the wardrobe, and reached over to pull the door open for him. “I grew up in the palace for years. I could stay here for the rest of my life, and no one would see me if I didn’t want them to.”