Of Dawn and Darkness (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 2) (27 page)

At this rate, he would be beaten to death by the spectators before he reached the end of the arena. Calder shot a glance at the guards in their towers overhead, hoping they wouldn’t react, and pulled his pistol from his jacket. He held it overhead like a banner as he advanced.

The crowd glared at him, and a few even spat at his feet, but at least no one pushed him anymore. Finally clear of the press of bodies, he took a deep breath, and immediately wished he hadn’t. The air was hot and thick with salt, and sweat, and blood, and almost ten thousand unwashed bodies.

“A man shows his weakness when he casts shame on his ancestors.”
A contemporary of Sadesthenes had written those words, though his name escaped Calder at the moment. He supposed he was showing his weakness right now, because he was suddenly ashamed of his Izyrian ancestors who had built this arena and those like it. It celebrated the opposite of civilization: the brutal, unfettered rule of blood and steel. Writhing in the seats, crying for blood, these looked like Elders rather than men.

Then again, he’d been raised in the Capital. The people here would probably say that keeping bloodshed confined to the arena was the very definition of civilized, keeping aggression out of the streets.

His philosophical musing kept him occupied as he slid past the grubby Izyrians filling the seats, his pistol still outstretched. At last, he reached the square platform.

It was exactly as it seemed: a section of seats flattened and raised to create an even surface that could be viewed from anywhere in the arena. Since the platform interrupted what would normally be a flight of stairs, there were exits built underneath. He peeked through one wooden door, which opened onto a spiral staircase that seemed to lead outside.

Calder tucked his pistol back into his jacket and unfolded his piece of paper and a stub of paper-wrapped charcoal. He made a quick, crude note of the exit positions. If they could get Urzaia up to this platform, they would have a straight run out of the arena.

A voiceless roar slammed into his ears like a crashing wave, and his head jerked of its own accord to the heart of the arena. There, a bloody Urzaia stood with one black hatchet lifted to the sky. The other was embedded in the center of the Houndmaster’s chest, splitting his horn Vessel in two. The man’s body sagged around the hatchet blade, which was the only thing keeping the corpse aloft.

Urzaia didn’t seem to care that he was holding the weight of a man with one hand. He smiled broadly at the crowd, the blood running down his face highlighting each of his teeth in red. The audience went wild, shouting for the Woodsman.

Calder couldn’t help thinking back to three years ago. The last time he’d seen the former Champion, the man had a smile that could blind an eagle at a thousand paces. Now, there were two black gaps where teeth had been knocked out in fights. The man showed more scars than armor, and several deep wounds showed that he’d have new scars when he next entered the arena.

If Calder had been faster, perhaps he could have helped Urzaia leave whole. Three years was already too long, and he would have to wait even longer.

The crier shouted something that was swallowed up by the shouts of the crowd, and then walked onstage himself. He gestured to Urzaia, who flicked the Houndmaster’s corpse off the end of his hatchet and followed, still smiling and waving to the crowd.

Led by the arena crier, Urzaia walked out of the sand and below...only to emerge a minute later in the arena seats. Right by Calder.

The fighter was so close that Calder could smell the blood on him. He tipped his hat lower, trying to squeeze back into the crowd—he couldn’t take it if he saw a look of hope on Urzaia’s face, hope that Calder would have to disappoint.

But the spectators weren’t content to let Calder leave. This close to the Champion gladiator, they screamed and pushed forward, shoving Calder up to the rough edge of the stone platform. Only by bracing his boot against the wall and flailing his pistol around did he earn a pocket of air, and by the time he looked back up, the crier and the Champion were standing above him.

On the platform.

The crier’s first statement was lost in the crowd, but his second was just barely audible: “...almost five hundred lives taken in the arena, with no signs of giving up!”

“None can make me surrender!” Urzaia shouted, raising his fists. His hatchets were missing, Calder noted—he must have given them up before he was allowed to get within reach of the paying spectators.

The crier waited for the furious cheers to die before he continued. “Are you here for glory, Woodsman? Or do you live to take lives?”

Urzaia laughed, a booming laugh that Calder was sure would have filled the arena even without invested Intent. “A man once promised to return my freedom,” he said. Calder felt as though his bones had turned to ice. “I must live so I can collect on that promise. And while I wait, I might as well have a little fun!”

The audience screamed, even as Calder forced his way through them and back to Jerri.

Urzaia would have to wait a while longer. There was nothing he could do about that. But the next time Calder visited this arena, he wouldn’t leave alone.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Someone’s in there,” Calder said.

No one wasted his time with questions or complaints. Andel looked at Foster, who shrugged and pulled open the door to the Emperor’s quarters.

A goat-legged Imperial Guard lay sprawled on the carpet inside, papers strewn all about him where he’d dropped them. He’d been conscious only a minute before, and there was little chance he’d taken that instant to pass out on his own. Someone else
was
inside.

Nothing beats the satisfaction of being right.
Together, Calder and Andel rushed in quietly, hauling the Imperial Guard out the door and back into the courtyard. The blond captain looked likely to shout, so Calder shook his head.

According to Calder’s silent, frantic signals, his crew shut the doors.

“What’s the security like in this building?” Calder whispered.

“It’s usually a death-trap for anyone inside,” the Guard captain responded, her eyes locked on the door. “But it’s been uninhabited for years. I need men.”

“Go get them. Capture, not kill. And send someone to inform Teach.”

She saluted and ran off, shouting before she was
quite
out of earshot.

“Who do you think it is, sir?” Andel asked, folding his arms and watching the door.

“Consultants,” Calder said. Someone had already hired a Champion to take a crack at him. Why not a real assassin? “They killed Maxeus a couple of days ago, and now they’re working up the ladder.”

Foster drew a weapon, holding it low in both hands. “You’re not real humble, are you?”

“‘Humility is the death-knell of the soul,’” Calder quoted. “Enterius, I think.”

“Loreli had some views of her own on the matter,” Andel said. He didn’t sound particularly alarmed by the idea of a Consultant waiting for them in the Emperor’s chambers. “‘Humility is the perfection that we should always seek, but can never truly achieve.’”

“You were a Luminian; obviously you’d take
her
side.”

“I wasn’t aware you’d been in a dispute with the Regent, sir.”

That actually raised an interesting point. He’d always thought of Loreli as a strategist and scholar from the ancient past, not a contemporary. But she hadn’t ever died, not really, and she was currently awake and serving the Empire as a Regent.

She didn’t want another Emperor. What did that say about—

His unproductive train of thought was broken by the Guard captain’s return. “They’re taking up position,” she said. “I suggest we remove you to a safe location.”

“Thank you, Captain, but I decline.” Calder pulled off his hat and swept her a bow. “I’m wearing my own clothes today, I’m hanging out with my own friends—”

Foster coughed pointedly.

“—my own colleagues, and I’ll handle this the way I usually would.”

“Foolishly, but directly,” Andel said.

“I would have said ‘bravely.’”

“I’m sure you would have, sir.”

Honestly, Calder was in a better mood than he’d been in for…weeks, probably. His wounds were starting to improve, though they were also starting to
itch
, he was finally feeling at home in the Imperial Palace, he thought he was making headway in his identity as Imperial Steward, and for the first time he was faced with an assassin that he’d outwitted and overmatched from the very beginning.

“I have to insist,” the Guard captain was saying. “We have no idea who the enemy is, what he wants, or what he can—”

She was interrupted by the deafening shriek of tearing metal, which filled the courtyard as one of the Emperor’s bronze doors crumpled like a used handkerchief.

Calder was still trying to figure out how to react to the sight of a balled-up door when it began to roll, with ponderous force and surprising speed, away from its housing and straight toward him.

He dove to the side as Andel and Foster did likewise, the three of them separated by a loose ball of bronze. Something exploded—a gunshot, he realized, close to his ear—and then a dark-skinned man in the black of a Consultant Gardener was slashing a bronze knife toward his waist.

Calder staggered back, grasping at his sword, but he knew he wouldn’t make it. The assassin was too close, too fast, his approach too unexpected.

Andel moved first.

He slammed into the Gardener with a running shoulder-tackle that sent the man rolling over the tiles, bronze blades clattering away from his hands.

Calder looked at Andel with relief and more than a little astonishment. “You saved me, Andel.”

The quartermaster was still on his knees, unbalanced after the tackle, but his eyes were on the Consultant. “Not quite yet, sir.”

Both of the Gardener’s hands came up, and a pair of tiny silver knives flashed out. One flew toward Andel, one toward Calder.

This time, Calder was ready.

His Awakened cutlass was in his hand, blade glowing with irregular orange spots like the pattern on a live coal. He slapped the throwing knife from the air, though the sudden motion pulled on his wounded shoulder. At least he hadn’t put too much weight on his injured leg; if it collapsed on him again, that would be the opening the Consultant needed.

Calder recognized Meia’s friend Lucan. They’d met once, in the depths of the Gray Island, though Calder hadn’t recalled the man’s name until Meia repeated it.

He started to speak, but the Gardener had pressed his palms against the stone tiles of the courtyard as though Reading.
He’s welcome to it,
Calder thought. He looked up at the Guard captain, motioning to surround the attacker.

Then the ground of the Imperial courtyard surged to life like a sea in storm, thrashing and throwing men around. Calder slammed to his back, which didn’t do his wounded shoulder any favors, and saw that Foster’s body was being tossed around like a rag doll.

He only had a brief second to wonder about Foster. When had the gunner gone down? Was he immobilized by one of those Gardener paralyzing needles, or was he dead? Then the rock beneath Calder shook any sense from his head.

Calder woke seconds later, to Andel’s soft laughter and the feel of his wrists tightly bound behind his back. He squirmed around for a better look, and saw Lucan only a few feet away, sitting cross-legged on the now motionless stone.

It was with relief that he noted ropes on Foster’s hands—no one would bother to tie a dead man.

“That’s kind of you,” Calder said. If he could make conversation, maybe he could point out some common ground. Just knowing Meia might take him out of this. “Tying us up, I mean. I thought you’d be more likely to slit our throats.”

He almost winced. Why give the man any ideas?

“I like to make sure my victims deserve it,” Lucan said, calm as a soft breeze.

Yet you still call them ‘victims,’
Calder noticed, but he didn’t say it. He raised one eyebrow at Lucan instead. “And you thought
we
didn’t deserve it? You’re a generous man. Besides, mercy is a quality I never thought I’d see in an assassin.”

“You know many hired killers, do you?”

More and more every day, it seems,
he thought. Out loud, he said, “‘The quality of mercy is among the rarest of virtues, and rarest of all in killers and kings.’ Sadesthenes. You should read him sometime. Timeless wisdom in the classics.”

“You’re assuming I haven’t read him already,” Lucan said, unperturbed.

Calder brightened a little. If he’d read Sadesthenes, that might make for more common ground. More reason for him to let them go. “Have you?”

“No.”

A dead end. Calder cast around for a change of subject.

“I can’t help but notice you’re not making a hasty getaway.” Around the edges of the courtyard, Imperial Guards were pulling themselves to their feet and calling for backup. Lucan had to notice, but he didn’t move or point them out.

“And you’re chatty for someone with his hands tied. I can still make a gag.”

As long as Lucan kept responding, Calder could keep the exchange going. And the longer their chat stretched, the more chance for an escape. “I enjoy getting to know interesting people. A Consultant saboteur who attacks the Imperial Palace, fights three men singlehandedly, and then lingers on the scene of the crime is an interesting man indeed.” Not to mention the way that he apparently used Reading to temporarily Awaken stone; Calder would have to get the Magisters to explain that one.

“Your flattery is indeed the most powerful weapon in your arsenal, sir,” Andel piped in. He was weighing in to help the conversation along, the same as Calder, and humor would lighten any situation. “Thank the God we have you to defend us.”

“Shut up, Andel!” Calder said, as he’d said a thousand times on the ship.

“Mmmphmphmmm!” Foster said. Joining in the banter, just as he would on
The Testament
…and, not coincidentally, letting them know he was conscious and alive.

“Shut up, Foster,” Calder said, and he’d never put more affection into the phrase. “Now, stranger, I’m sure you know my name. I’ve learned to assume the Consultants know everything.”