Of Kings and Killers Read online

  “It’s so loud out there,” she whimpered. She touched an ear. “Not just in here, but in here.” The finger moved from her ear to the side of her head, where she twisted it as though trying to drill a hole in her own skull.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. It will settle down soon.”

  “I wanted to make everyone be silent, but Alsa Grayweather said that these were citizens of the Imperial Palace, and we’d named you Steward. So they belonged to you. That was true, I agreed to it, and I don’t want to break anything that’s yours. But now you’re here, and you can let me!”

  She looked up at him with hopeful eyes. She was certainly older than him, but she looked like a child begging her parent for help.

  He selected every word with the care of an alchemist mixing components. “Bliss…I’ve been doing my best to make everything silent for you. I’m going to go back out there and see if I can get them to quiet down. Can you let me try first?”

  Her brow furrowed, but she straightened up and nodded once, sharply. Then she reached out and smoothed the creases she made in his shirt. “I am sorry about this, I’m simply…out of sorts. Because of the noise.”

  He didn’t know if the clash of powerful Intent had roused her Soulbound Vessel, but he wondered if this might be the true attack they’d feared from the Elders all along. “Nothing to apologize for, Bliss. We’re—”

  A thundering crash shook the world outside.

  Calder dashed downstairs, his mother following him. He glanced back once to see if Bliss had joined them, but when he turned back, he found her already peeking out of the front door.

  The other Watchmen backed carefully away from her, but Calder deliberately stepped up, looking over her head and through the cracked door.

  Teach and Kern had been smashed down into the street, the paving-stones ruptured where they had landed. An invisible force pinned Teach flat to the ground, Tyrfang just out of her reach, but Kern snarled and pushed against it. The red light in his armor flared, and his knees trembled as he fought.

  Against the might of Estyr Six.

  The Regent lifted into the air, staring down at them all with the icy glare of an Empress. Her skin was covered by dust and blood, but the combination made her expression into a regal mask. Her coat had been shredded, and now it blew in the wind like the ends of her hair.

  The three reptilian skulls floated around her head.

  Kern hadn’t managed to finish her off in time.

  “Citizens, lay down your weapons!” Estyr’s voice echoed between the buildings, majestic and resonant. “This battle is over.”

  And so it was.

  Calder let the weight of failure settle onto him. He’d lost. He had made too many stupid mistakes, rushed too much, played the odds too many times. No one could stand against Estyr Six. It was the end.

  Estyr called out once more. “Calder Marten. Come out.”

  Bliss turned to look at him, real concern in her eyes. He patted her shoulder as he pushed past her and walked into the street.

  His shirt had been newly white this morning, and now it was stained with soot and the blood of others. An odd detail to focus on, but it seemed to represent the day.

  He walked out to stand under Estyr, looking up at her. A stream of dust fell from her body, trickling down in front of him.

  Now it would be up to her to fix the world.

  He would get no chance to try and preserve the Empire, to create a world governed by mortals. He wouldn’t get to fix or use the Optasia, or to settle things with Jerri. Someone else would have to do those things now.

  A stubborn spark of anger flared to life within him.

  No, not someone else. He’d fought to get here. He’d earned the right.

  And unlike what Ach’magut had promised, no one had yet addressed him as the Emperor of the World.

  But they would.

  He opened himself to the crown and let the Emperor’s Intent flow unfettered into his.

  He wasn’t wearing a crown that belonged to someone else. He was wearing the Emperor’s crown. His crown.

  He was the Emperor, and even Estyr Six was subject to his will.

  Distantly, he heard someone shout behind him. “No!”

  The Emperor addressed his oldest and most powerful subject. “Estyr. Stop.”

  He felt it work even before he saw the effects. Her Intent shook like a sheet in a stiff wind. Here, her legendary power and sensitivity as a Reader were her weaknesses; she could see that he wasn’t the Emperor she knew, she could hear a voice that sounded nothing like his, but her Reader’s senses contradicted and overrode all others.

  Her power relaxed. Just for a second.

  That was enough for Baldezar Kern.

  Even as Teach sat up, gasping, Kern stumbled forward. The force pinning him down was suddenly, unexpectedly, gone.

  As Estyr looked around for the Emperor, as her expression began to change as she realized her mistake, the Head of the Champion’s Guild had already leaped into the air.

  He swung one of his maces, the near-mythical weapons that had crushed a ship with every blow during the South Sea Rebellion. It slammed into Estyr’s chest, and from the point of impact, a fiery explosion bloomed into a crimson sun.

  Along with everyone else on the street, the Emperor was blinded by a wave of light and heat. He felt the explosion in his bones, felt the Intent of the buildings on either side of the street melt away as they were seared by the Champion’s fiery power. Glass shattered and paint peeled and paving-stones cracked.

  There came a far-off crash as Estyr was launched into a home at the far end of the street. The house collapsed around her.

  On the other side, Kern had been driven away as well, and he had landed just as hard.

  Kern’s own blow had been the strongest he could produce, strong enough that it would have staggered a Great Elder. He couldn’t withstand his own power…and in the same moment, Estyr had landed a hit of her own.

  Now he lay in a limp pile, his armor falling from him in smoking pieces. He was crumpled as though every bone in his body had broken.

  Teach staggered over to stand next to the Emperor, trying and failing to lift Tyrfang high enough to get it in the sheath over her shoulder. “Get…inside. She…may not…be…”

  A bone-curdling cry tore through the air.

  The Emperor turned to see Jorin Maze-walker, Regent of the South.

  He wasn’t supposed to be here.

  He knew the man as well as he knew himself. They had spent centuries…

  …no, wait, not centuries. He had met Jorin only briefly on the Gray Island.

  Why couldn’t he remember Jorin? They had fought the Great Elders together. So why didn’t he remember that?

  The Emperor remembered what the man was supposed to look like, at least. Instead of his trademark wide-brimmed hat, he wore a hood, and black-lensed glasses perched on his nose.

  He was screaming in apparent anguish, swinging his sword.

  His sword that carried an Intent of pure death.

  The nameless weapon was the prototype for Teach’s Tyrfang. Its blade was rotten, corrupting, like a septic and leprous wound. But it held terrible, ancient power. Enough to blight forests with every cut.

  And now he was swinging that weapon at the Emperor. His friend. His sworn ruler.

  Hideous, rotting darkness swept toward him, and he stood exposed in the center of the street. There was nothing to do, nowhere to hide, and no time to react.

  The Emperor would meet his demonstration with power. He raised one hand, gathering his Intent…

  Teach shoved him behind her.

  She held Tyrfang before herself with both hands, pumping out all the power she could from her Vessel, screaming as darkness met darkness. Horror and bloodshed filled the air, drowning out the Intent from the crown.

  Overwhelmed, Calder’s mind shut down.

  His body crumbled to the stone.

  Calder was shaken awake to see Cheska leaning over h
im.

  Her hat was gone, her hair tied back, her face smeared with soot and blood. Tears tracked down her cheeks, but she was staring at him in shock.

  Her expression brightened on seeing his eyes open, and she seized him by his arm, pulling him roughly to his feet. “Not the time to lie down on the job, Captain.”

  Still dazed, Calder leaned on her and tried to sort through his recent memories. He remembered Estyr, and then…

  He’d been powerful.

  He’d been ancient.

  He’d been…someone else.

  Before he could organize his thoughts, a violent stench penetrated his consciousness, and he gagged. It smelled like rotten meat and burning refuse. What was that?

  His eyes were drawn to Teach.

  She still knelt in the same pose as when she had defended him: kneeling with Tyrfang braced in front of her. Now she held on to the sword with only one hand, leaning on it for support. The plates of her armor had largely been melted away, revealing scarred mail beneath.

  But the armor had fared better than her head.

  The memory snapped back into place: she had taken Jorin’s blow with Tyrfang. While wearing no helmet.

  Her hair had burned away completely, but her skin had been blackened and tightened to her skull. She looked like a dehydrated corpse, preserved in a desert tomb for centuries. What remained of her lips had been drawn tight, revealing her teeth.

  The road beneath her was the point of a wedge, inside of which the paving-stones were intact and unharmed. To either side, the street had been melted and blackened, toxic shadows spreading on the ground behind her like a pair of wings.

  Calder looked down at the clean stone on which he and Cheska stood. The Head of the Imperial Guard had stood as a bulwark against the darkness for his sake.

  Teach had given her life for his.

  She hadn’t even liked him.

  Cheska was pulling him back, away from Teach, so that he could leave without stepping on the cursed stones. He heaved himself free, moving closer to Teach.

  They couldn’t leave her corpse here. If it was the only thing he accomplished as Imperial Steward, he would ensure that she was buried in the Palace, next to the other heroes of the Empire.

  A faint, sudden beat, like a single strike on a drum, stopped him in his tracks.

  There came another. And then a third, faster.

  It sounded like a…heartbeat.

  Teach’s eyes snapped open and she inhaled a breath so sharply that it resembled a scream. Her eyes were too wide and too bright in her ravaged face, and as she sucked in air, she stared sightlessly into the distance.

  After a long, painful moment in which Calder stared in horror, Teach’s eyes rolled back into her head. Then she pitched backward, her armor falling apart on impact with the ground.

  Calder focused his Intent on the crown. “Guards!”

  A few Imperial Guards had started running for her already, but now they sprinted, leaping the black part of the street or weaving around.

  He forced himself to turn away from the Guild Head. They would take care of her, if anyone could, and there was more work to be done.

  Cheska’s attention was still locked on Teach, her mouth hanging open. Calder gently pulled her along with him.

  “I thought she was dead,” Cheska whispered. “I’d have bet my left hand…”

  “She hasn’t made it out yet. What happened?”

  The Head of the Navigators steeled herself and shifted course. “The Independents escaped. Try not to be too shocked, but they had an escape plan. Melted away like dew. We would have chased them, but…”

  She waved a hand to indicate their surroundings. The injured stumbled between scarred buildings, separating the dead from the dying.

  “And Estyr?”

  Calder tried not to swallow too hard as he asked the question. If the Regent had survived, she could come back for the rest of them at any second.

  Cheska let out a long breath. “The body’s gone.”

  His heart plummeted into a chasm.

  “Bliss says the last Consultants to escape were carrying something, but she couldn’t stop them. Jorin covered their retreat.”

  Calder wouldn’t have followed after Jorin either. Not after seeing the man blacken stone for dozens of yards.

  “How’s Kern?”

  Cheska staggered next to him, and he steadied her with an arm. She shivered beneath him, and he remembered she must be as exhausted as he was.

  “I don’t know,” she said wearily. “Let’s find out.”

  Unsteadily, she turned to the side, toward the inn the Blackwatch had been using as their headquarters. They had turned the inside into a surgery, with wounded on pallets covering every table and every inch of the floor.

  The injured were tended by Watchmen without their coats, bandaged Imperial Guards, Magisters in bloodstained robes, Imperial Palace staff still in their livery…anyone who wasn’t too badly injured themselves.

  Calder asked a question of one of the Watchmen and was pointed upstairs, toward the room where he had met with Bliss and his mother earlier. They were in there now, standing against the far wall and watching the man on the bed.

  Baldezar Kern’s armor had been pried off of him in chunks. His bull helmet lay cracked into two pieces.

  His face was a mask of blood, and a six-inch length of wood jutted from his chest. It had penetrated his armor, drilling through a piece of steel that was still fused to his flesh; Estyr must have launched it at him like a bullet in the last instant.

  A member of the Alchemist’s Guild, no doubt taken captive out of the battle, worked desperately on his wounds. She took a breath as Calder walked in, wiping sweat from her forehead but leaving a swipe of Kern’s blood behind.

  “I don’t have anything here,” she said to Bliss. The alchemist took on a begging tone. “Please, I can’t do any more. He’s gone.”

  Kern’s chest still rose and fell with irregular breaths.

  “He’s breathing,” Calder said.

  The alchemist didn’t seem to want to look away from Bliss. “Champions don’t give up easily. Even when they’re already dead.”

  Bliss stood against the wall with her spine straight, but her eyes were hooded and dark. “I could have silenced them all.”

  “Yes,” Calder said. “I’m sorry.”

  His mother looked at him with pain on her face, but she didn’t disagree.

  Together, in silence, they stood vigil until the Head of the Champion’s Guild breathed his last.

  Chapter Seven

  three years ago

  It took three days for Calder and The Testament to reach the roaming island, but when they did, he didn’t need Jerri’s confirmation of their coordinates to know they were in the right place.

  The island was dense with growth, choked with jungle in a way that you rarely saw on the Aion Sea, and the water was shallow enough around the shore that Calder would never have pegged it for a roaming island except for one detail: the unmistakable shape of The Reliable tangled up in the treeline.

  All Navigator ships were one-of-a-kind Awakened objects, but this one was distinct even among its fellows. It looked like a giant conch shell that had been grown into the shape of a ship, its form curving in pink-and-seafoam curls to form a hull. Its mast jutted up like a natural growth, though its sails were made from ordinary white sailcloth.

  The Reliable had been caught in the island’s clutches. Trees and vines had extended from the jungle, seizing the ship and dragging it close. The sand beneath the ship pushed it upwards so that it had tilted, leaning drunkenly against the trees.

  If Calder hadn’t known better, he would have thought the ship had run aground on this island years ago, long enough that trees and vines had grown up around it. But Captain Tommison’s contract had started a few months before, and his ship was half the speed of The Testament. He had made it only a week out from the Capital before the island had caught him.

  If this roamin
g island had been predatory, the ship would have been sunk or consumed, the crown lost to Kelarac.

  Looking at the pink ship, Calder thought of the man with the steel blindfold and what the Collector of Souls could do with the Emperor’s crown.

  Even in the tropical wind, he shivered.

  “We’ll have to take a longboat to shore,” he said, lowering his spyglass. “I don’t know how a roaming island brings a beach with it, but if that’s the strangest thing we see ashore, I’ll swallow a cannon.”

  “Not one of my cannons,” Foster grumbled.

  “I will, of course, require the services of my trusty cook.”

  Urzaia Woodsman thumbed one of his hatchets. “Yes, Captain! There may be something delicious out there!”

  Calder wasn’t entirely certain the man was joking, but he pushed on. “Foster, you stay here and man the guns. Petal—”

  He was in time to catch one glimpse of frizzy hair before the trap door down to the hold slammed shut.

  “—as you were, then, Petal. Mister Petronus, you’re coming ashore. Jerri, assist Foster with the cannons, if you don’t mind.”

  Cheska had sent him away with the Guild’s best estimates of what could have happened to Captain Tommison and the crew of The Reliable, and Calder had spent plenty of time on speculations of his own. If they were only trapped by the island, then Calder would free them and escort them to the destination of their delivery.

  Alternatively, they could have been apprehended by another party, in which case they were likely dead and the crown taken. Now that he could see the ship seized by the island, he considered this less likely…but still not impossible.

  An enemy could have boarded the ship, killed the crew, and—unable to sail a Navigator’s vessel—run the ship aground.

  Third, Captain Tommison could have taken the crown for himself and fled. Once again, the circumstances seemed to disprove that, but Calder couldn’t rule it out yet. Maybe Tommison would greet Navigator reinforcements with musket-fire.

  Finally, something strange could have happened. And strange on the Aion Sea meant strange indeed. Elders could be wearing their bodies like husks, or a rogue Kameira could have driven their ship into the island in a rage.