Of Kings and Killers Read online

  He was a bit surprised that no one argued. His path was the only sensible one in the circumstances, but he was used to his orders being incessantly questioned.

  Now that they knew this wasn’t a roaming island, they could risk the beach. Everyone climbed down to the sand, and once they were together and Urzaia had recovered his grappling hook and rope, they jogged around the outside of the island.

  In moments, they rounded the edge of the trees where their lifeboat was visible. Urzaia sprinted ahead to secure the boat, where he would walk it into the surf and wait for everyone else. Once they were back aboard The Testament, they could plan the next day in safety.

  Urzaia hadn’t covered half the distance to the lifeboat when the surf exploded.

  It looked like the hybrid of a crocodile and a flatworm, a long smooth-skinned monstrosity with jaws that elongated as it struck. Calder only saw part of the creature, the rest remaining coiled in the shallows, and the length he saw was enough to snap into their lifeboat and crunch it to splinters.

  Urzaia roared, hurling his hatchet, but the monster slithered back into water as quickly as it had appeared. The Champion’s Awakened weapon struck the beach, sending a geyser of sand exploding into the darkening sky.

  Calder and the others came stumbling to a halt as horror seized their legs.

  Calder couldn’t help but imagine their trip here on the lifeboat. That worm-creature could have been coiled beneath them the entire time, watching their shadow pass over it. If it had struck, it would have snapped their boat in half with them inside.

  He had no doubt that Urzaia would have torn the thing to pieces afterward. But, barring an astronomical stroke of luck, it would have been too late for the rest of them.

  He pushed the gibbering terror to the back of his mind, focusing on their immediate crisis. “Back to The Reliable!” he called.

  They reversed their march in an instant, dashing back down the beach.

  Only a few steps later, the water beneath the conch-shell hull boiled. As though to mock them, the fanged worm rose from the water. It rested its head on the deck of the ship, hissing as it sniffed around the deck. After a minute or two of lazy exploration, it slowly slithered back into the surf.

  “We’re cursed,” Andel muttered.

  Far more than the monster’s appearance, Calder was horrified by what its action meant. “It heard me.”

  All four of them were quiet.

  “It might not have understood your words,” Jerri pointed out. “It may have recognized that we only had one option, like a cat watching a mouse-hole.”

  “Does that make it better?” Calder asked. His tone was sarcastic, but he deeply hoped someone would say yes.

  “Worse, if anything,” Andel put in.

  “Thank you, Andel.”

  Together, they turned to the treeline in the deepening orange light of the setting sun.

  “Whatever we do, we’ve got to do it now,” Calder said. “Does anyone want to stay on the beach?”

  Urzaia gripped a hatchet in each hand. “I am ready for it now. When it strikes again, I will cut it down. If there is only one.”

  “Into the jungle we go,” Calder announced.

  This time, Urzaia plowed through the trees at a pace the rest could barely match. His head never stopped swiveling, his eyes sharp, his hatchets ready to take a life with a second’s notice.

  Though the rest of them were infinitely less dangerous, they were no more relaxed.

  Andel and Calder both held a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other while Jerri clutched a pistol in both hands. Calder kept his eyes on the jungle half the time and on Jerri the other half. He couldn’t shake a terrified vision of something snapping her up before he could react, pulling her into the jungle and a fate worse than death.

  The march through the trees seemed to last hours, but when the shadows had lengthened and they reached the base of the tower of yellowed stone, Calder was still surprised that they had made it already. Nothing had jumped out at them, and no one was hurt.

  Which only meant that the spawn of Othaghor were holding themselves in reserve for later.

  The tower looked as though it could have been five hundred years old, and its doors had long since rotted away. Its new “doors” were a pile of garbage and lashed-together logs that formed a makeshift wall.

  “Let us in!” Calder shouted the second he saw the newly made barricade.

  “Identify yourselves!” a man’s high-pitched voice called from the other side. “We can’t trust any strange—”

  Low on time and patience, Calder cut him off. “Calder Marten, Captain of The Testament, here on orders from the Navigator’s Guild searching for Captain Tommison of The Reliable. Now let us in or my cook will do it for you.”

  Calder had no doubt that Urzaia would tear his way inside in an instant, but he wasn’t poised to do so at the moment. He stood with his back to the tower, facing the jungle around him with a hatchet in each hand as though he meant to do battle with all the unknown hordes of Othaghor.

  A hurried, whispered discussion ensued from behind the barricade, which lasted long enough that Calder almost ordered Urzaia to break through.

  Finally, a plank at the bottom corner started to shiver.

  “Give me a second to untie it,” the voice said. “And you’ll have to crawl.”

  Rather than face a jungle filled with who knew what Elderspawn, Calder was ready to dig.

  The three surviving members of The Reliable’s crew waited for Calder behind the barricade.

  Miss Lakiri, a gunner from Jerri’s ancestral homeland of Vandenyas, was built along the lines of a stone statue. She brooded in silence, thick arms crossed, glaring at Calder throughout her introduction.

  Her companion was Mister Goss, a ship’s navigator who looked like pale skin stretched over a tall, gangly skeleton. He kept checking a pocketwatch and his every word was high-pitched and nervous, as though he expected to be overheard by someone who wouldn’t approve.

  Finally, Captain Tommison himself had lived as well. He looked like a fanciful portrait of a Navigator from half a century before, with his long gray walrus mustache and his navy blue bicorn hat that matched his jacket. His jacket and shirt strained across a prodigious gut, and his every word was a pronouncement.

  “We have lost our alchemist and gunner in battle against the forces of darkness,” Tommison declared, scratching at his eye as though outlining a monocle. “Since we shut ourselves in here a fortnight ago, we have scarcely been bothered by the monsters outside. We have kept our minds and souls occupied by games of chance and any other means available to us, and we have food stores enough to occupy us for weeks more. So long as we have no further hungry mouths to feed, that is.”

  He eyed Calder in disapproval.

  “You’ve seen the tiny creatures in the trees?” Calder asked.

  “We’ve been calling them Slithers,” Goss put in, flinching as though he thought Calder would hit him for interrupting.

  “Slithers it is. Well, I don’t know if you’ve seen their larger cousin in the water, but it’s got a taste for boat. It doesn’t want us to leave, but it had no problem with us joining you here.”

  The statement floated over them, hanging in the air, as they all separately came to the same conclusion that no one wanted to voice.

  No one except Urzaia. The Champion lounged on a barrel, idly toying with a hatchet. “We should not stay. If they wish to keep us here, it can only be because something else is coming.”

  Mister Goss rubbed at his own eye. It looked like a nervous tic, but so did everything else the man did.

  Calder clapped his hands together to gather everyone’s attention and snap them out of their hopeless reverie. “Fortunately for all of us, we have some options. We bring with us a Champion—” He indicated Urzaia, who gave a seated bow. “—and another surprise that we arranged before leaving the ship. I believe we can push through the jungle to The Reliable. Do you have weapons of your own?
”

  He addressed this to Miss Lakiri, who was rubbing surreptitiously at her own eye. Maybe there was something going around.

  “Alchemical munitions,” she said. “Enough to burn all the trees on the island to ash, if we set them up right.”

  Tommison drew himself up to his full height, which was unimpressive, especially as he was standing in Mister Goss’ shadow. “Now, see here. Even if we board my ship, how do we clear these worms that haunt the beach?”

  “We just have to launch for open water,” Calder said. “If we get close enough to The Testament, I can take care of them.”

  The Lyathatan would eat the Elder worms for breakfast. Perhaps literally.

  The crew of The Reliable exchanged glances.

  “Too dangerous,” Tommison declared. “No, it’s far better to remain safe here and wait for Guild reinforcements.”

  Andel tilted his head. “Who else do you expect is coming? We are your Guild reinforcements.”

  “Be that as it may, I will not waste what remains of my crew on your…your…dash headlong into the maw of madness!”

  Calder took a deep breath and reminded himself that this man had just endured a very stressful few weeks.

  “We will be leaving at dawn,” he said with forced calm. “I would like your assistance. Without The Reliable, I will be forced to take a more dangerous method of reuniting with The Testament, but I will find a way. However, if you choose to stay here, we will be taking the crown with us.”

  All three of the other crew members stiffened. No one had mentioned the crown thus far, focusing instead on their immediate crisis of survival.

  Jerri finished plucking an eyelash from her eye, blinked it out, and then examined the strange reaction from The Reliable’s crew. “You do have the crown, don’t you?”

  “Of course!” Tommison blustered. “I would scarcely abandon my sacred charge. But I have no reason to turn it over to you.”

  “We need to see it,” Calder said.

  “Never! You will have to accept my good word that I—”

  “Captain,” Calder interrupted. “We need to work together to escape this situation, I’m sure you will agree. So I hesitate to take negotiations in a more aggressive direction. But either you show me the crown or I will have Urzaia find it.”

  Urzaia gave a cheery wave with a hand that happened to still be holding a hatchet.

  Tommison’s jowls turned a slow red, but he leaned away from the champion. He began sputtering about honor and trust, but as he was doing so, Miss Lakiri stood up. She turned around, huffing as she lifted with both hands the object she’d been sitting on.

  It was an iron box secured with chains, and from her strained expression, Calder knew it must be heavy.

  “If it’s not inside here,” Lakiri said, “we made this trip for nothing. But we don’t have the key.”

  Calder nodded. That had been in the packet of information Cheska had provided them regarding the mission; Captain Tommison wouldn’t have access to the crown itself for the duration of delivery. “Thank you, Miss Lakiri. Now, we’d like your help and access to your munitions as we leave. You’re all invited to come with us. But we are leaving at the first light of dawn.”

  Tommison fussed with his jacket and his hands, and he looked to his crew members as though searching for some reason to refuse. Finally, he shot a quick glance at Jerri that Calder suspected he wasn’t supposed to notice.

  He suppressed a surge of protective irritation. They weren’t even aboard the ship, and the man was already making eyes at Jerri.

  “Agreed,” Tommison said at last, deflating.

  “Very good. Now, we have no guarantee that the Slithers will leave us alone tonight, so we should post a watch on the doors. Andel?”

  “I’ll take first,” the quartermaster agreed, taking a seat next to a crack in the makeshift barrier that served them as a door. He folded his arms and looked out into the night.

  “Mister Goss, do you have an inventory of your munitions?”

  The ship’s navigator nodded quickly.

  “Then I suggest one of you prepare them for transport. We’ll need them at some point, either to free your ship or to burn down the entire island as Miss Lakiri suggests. The rest of you, make sure you have packed up anything you’d like to take with you.”

  They set up a watch schedule, which involved at least one member of The Testament’s crew awake at all times. Everyone, Calder had insisted, should do their best to sleep over the course of the night, but he didn’t trust Tommison or his crew.

  People did stupid things out of fear.

  Half an hour into Jerri’s watch, when Calder’s breathing was slow and even and Urzaia’s snores threatened to bring down the tower, she abandoned her post and slipped deeper into the structure.

  It looked as though the tower had once been an outpost of the Imperial army, or maybe one of the earlier Guilds. Although the stairs leading upward had been destroyed decades if not centuries before, the ground floor was still divided into multiple rooms. She passed a sleeping Goss and Lakiri, who had curled up under one blanket in each other’s arms.

  That was unexpected. She thought Lakiri must have fifteen years on Goss, and she had a face about as appealing as the blunt edge of a cliff. Then again, Goss himself looked like a skeleton animated to haunt the nightmares of children, so maybe it was a match decreed by the Great Ones themselves.

  She found Tommison in the back, carefully wrapping ceramic cylinders in cushioning layers of cloth. He settled them into padded boxes, which were stuffed with more clothes to prevent the alchemical explosives from jostling in transport.

  Jerri stopped when she saw what he was doing. He nodded to her, acknowledging her presence, but did not take his eyes from his task. He had finally removed his hat and jacket, rolling up his sleeves to the elbow, but a thin sheen of sweat still showed on his forehead.

  She could relate. If these munitions were properly made, then it wasn’t quite as dangerous as a single wrong gesture sending them all up in a pillar of fire, but who knew what might set off a batch of alchemical explosives?

  When he finally finished, delicately closing the box, he let out a heavy breath and settled against one wall. “I apologize; I have never been comfortable around alchemicals. Now, did you have some business with me, Miss…Tessella, was it?”

  Jerri gave him a flat look and traced a circle around her left eye. “You signaled me, and you did it with the subtlety of a baboon.”

  “I expected your entire crew to be loyal,” Tommison said, keeping a careful eye on the doorway. There were no doors remaining here, so they had to keep their voices down. “I didn’t think my message would reach only one of you.”

  “Well, you reached me. Now, how did you mangle things so badly that you ended up in this…situation?”

  Tommison looked steadily behind her, keeping his eyes fixed on the hallway and his voice low. Even so, he said nothing that would be unduly incriminating if they were overheard. “We docked with this island as an agreed rendezvous point, but there were other parties interested in the cargo. We were provided with a…breeding pair…for just such an eventuality, but we were not apprised of the dangers. We released them into the jungle, but they overwhelmed us in days.”

  Jerri closed her eyes and fought against the rage that echoed between her and her Soulbound Vessel.

  Burn down the island and him with it, her earring suggested. It was a tempting vision.

  “I’m trying to imagine how someone could be so monumentally stupid,” she said. “I’m having trouble picturing it.”

  Based on his earlier persona, Jerri expected Tommison to fly into a defensive tirade, but instead he responded quietly. “We were supposed to be provided a quick exit from this tower, but when we tried to bring the cargo through, our passageway collapsed. We have been out of contact since.”

  That, at least, clarified the picture for Jerri.

  Tommison had expected to deliver the crown by void transmis
sion to the Sleepless cabal, but the Emperor’s powerful Intent remaining in the object had destroyed the portal. Leaving them stuck with the mindless spawn of Othaghor and waiting for assistance.

  Also, she was beginning to realize that Tommison was not as much of a fool as he appeared.

  “Where were you to deliver the package?”

  “To the head office,” he said, meaning the head cabal of the Sleepless. “They were to donate it to a private collection.”

  Kelarac.

  There were those who said that anything thrown into the Aion Sea went into Kelarac’s collection—even Calder believed that. In reality, it depended on which of the Great Ones’ influence was stronger in the area. Here, if they tossed the crown into the water, it would more than likely end up in Othaghor’s claws.

  And that was something no one wanted. Least of all the Sleepless. They could learn from Othaghor—he clearly understood the mechanics of life better than any human ever could—but he saw humanity as no more important than frogs or spiders.

  There was no civilized discussion with the Hordefather. Whatever swarms he designed to inherit the earth, they would leave no room for humanity except perhaps as food.

  “The situation has changed,” Jerri told him. “We have a new purpose for the cargo.”

  Carefully shielding the view of the hallway with her body, she cupped her hand in front of her and ignited one quick, green spark.

  Tommison’s eyebrows lifted, but he gave no other response. Some Imperial citizens would have been impressed or terrified at the prospect of being in the same room as a Soulbound, but all Navigator captains were bound to their ships. He had personally interacted with more Soulbound than most people would have ever heard of.

  “I’ll still have to refuse,” he said. “Orders. You can take it up with the head office yourself if you’d like.”

  “Then what is your plan now? You can’t deliver the package directly, and we certainly aren’t bound for the head office.”

  Tommison’s eyes were dead. “We’ll figure something out.”