Of Kings and Killers Read online

  Something came to rest on the leg of his armor. He glanced at it from beneath his hands, as though peeking at cards that weren’t his own, and saw that Jerri had rested her bound hands on his knee.

  He dared to look at her face.

  Her belligerent mask had gone, leaving true concern.

  “Are you all right?” she asked quietly.

  He almost broke down at the simple question. If she had still been only his wife, he would have.

  “I don’t know why I called you up here,” he said instead. “I’m sorry. Is there anything you need?”

  She took her hands away and leaned back in her chair, now amused. “Ruling the world not as easy as you thought?”

  “I don’t want to rule the world. I want to use the position of Emperor to benefit more than just the Emperor.” But she knew that, so he added, “…and besides, right now I don’t even rule my own guards.”

  “What a coincidence!” She held up her bound hands. “They’re my guards too!”

  In spite of himself, he gave her a laugh. A small one.

  The silence that settled over them then was comfortable. At first. But with every passing second, it grew colder and colder, as though he shared the room with a stranger.

  When he could stand it no longer, he spoke. “Why are we here, Jerri?”

  He expected a joke. A jibe. A deflection.

  Instead, she said, “I handled myself…badly. I couldn’t have done worse.”

  Calder sat back and waited for her to continue.

  “I shouldn’t have lied to you for so long. I could have started with pieces of the truth, years ago, and worked my way up. But I…convinced myself that things were fine as they were. Everything would work out. Especially after…” She lowered her voice completely, merely mouthing the next words: “…the Great One.”

  Ach’magut. The Great Elder and his prophecy.

  Or his plan.

  “Tell me now,” Calder said, and he hadn’t realized how hungry he was for this. “Tell me the truth.”

  She flinched and looked away from his eyes, but with a deep breath for courage, she dove in. “My father brought me to the Sleepless when I was a girl. They’re not what you think. At least, not the smart ones. There are some who worship or sell themselves blindly to the Elders, and they usually get what they deserve.

  “But as a whole, what the Sleepless do is exactly what the Blackwatch does. What the Navigators do. What we do.” She leaned forward, speaking earnestly. “My father was a Watchman himself, and he didn’t lose his sanity. He realized that we shouldn’t just be studying Elders, we should be learning from them. They’ve lived for thousands of years, and they have knowledge from worlds beyond this one. Truths we could never hope to learn ourselves.”

  Her rational, convincing tone made her message all the more disturbing to Calder. “I’ve heard this before.”

  “But you haven’t listened.” Her eyes were intense, but not angry. As intelligent and passionate as he’d ever seen them. “They do share truths with us, Calder. Techniques that work. How do you imagine I got away from the Gray Island when the Handmaiden attacked? I called messengers, and they carried me through their void to the Capital. It’s a two-day journey, and I made it in minutes.”

  She stood up from her chair, pacing as furiously as she could with bound ankles. “They teach us summoning rituals for Elderspawn. You know what that means? It’s the same as ‘summoning’ a dog. You need the creature’s name, some bait—like food or a toy—and you use the right tone. That’s it. How do you think you ended up with Shuffles?”

  That sounded so logical that it disturbed him. He had an Elder chained to his ship. He’d bartered with Kelarac for the sword he wore. Ach’magut had predicted him standing in this place, wearing a crown. He had used Kelarac’s mark on his arm to Read, predict, and destroy a small army of Elderspawn.

  The Emperor himself had used one of Nakothi’s hearts to stay alive. It was a guiding principle of the Blackwatch that the Elders had to be studied if they were to be opposed.

  He had already benefited from several face-to-face deals with intelligent Elders. Why not more?

  But he was still sure that she had tried to bait him into killing himself. “What about the Optasia?” he asked.

  The Emperor’s true throne was a device to amplify Reading, to send it out all over the world. Jerri had attempted to convince him to use it to converse with the Great Elders, but everyone else—Calder himself included—was certain that doing so would destroy his mind. Even the Emperor had refused to use it in his final years because the danger was so great.

  Jerri paused in her pacing. She looked away from him and bit her lip. “That…may have been a mistake.”

  “What was a mistake? You asking me to use it? Me not listening to you? You killing that Consultant?”

  “The entire purpose of making you the Emperor was to give us someone who could negotiate directly with the Great Elders, so when he told me you were supposed to use the throne, it made sense to me.”

  “He?”

  “The man with the steel blindfold.”

  She met his eyes, and Calder knew they were both thinking the same name. Kelarac.

  Calder had dealt with the Soul Collector several times before, so he couldn’t hold that against her. But he had never fooled himself that Kelarac was on his side. If anything, the Great Elder wanted to own him.

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “That our real enemy is Shera of the Consultants.” She said it immediately, and with such conviction that Calder wondered if she had planned to lead the conversation here the entire time.

  “I believe him,” she continued. “But not just him. The Sleepless have certain predictions from Ach’magut, and even a few notes from other sources. They call her the Killer.”

  She had started twisting the end of her hair with her bound hands, as though nervously trying to work it into a braid. “Calder…she’s supposed to be dead.”

  The door cracked open, and the tusked Guard from earlier poked her head in. She was trying to subtly remind him that he had more meetings on his schedule than just this one.

  He stood, straightening his sheathed sword. As he focused on it, he felt the Intent of his armor pressing in on him, trying to overwhelm him with its strength. It surprised him with its strength; he hadn’t made a conscious attempt to Read the armor. It was as though the Emperor’s Intent was trying to push its way into him anyway.

  He managed to force it away, but the brief mental struggle helped distract him from his confusion.

  Jerri had noticed that she’d gone as far as she could. She released her hair, her eyes dead and her shoulders slumped.

  She looked so defeated.

  Before he realized what was happening, he’d rested a hand on her. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’ll call you again.”

  He almost kissed her head out of habit, but the pain of betrayal held him back. Still, that much physical contact was too much from the Imperial Guard, who marched into the room and grabbed her from Calder.

  He stepped back and let them bring her back to the dungeon. He hadn’t forgotten everything she’d done; if she really was in the right, she wouldn’t have lied to him for years.

  But when she was being escorted out of the room, she glanced back over her shoulder and he saw a faint, desperate hope in her eyes.

  He was glad to see it.

  Chapter Two

  four years ago

  Petal settled into the rafters, plugging her nose against the thick dust so she didn’t sneeze.

  Her arms and legs ached from the effort of climbing up here. She was no natural climber—the most athletic thing she usually did was climbing up on top of the stool nailed to the deck of her cabin in The Testament. Sometimes she lifted beakers.

  Today, she had brewed up an adhesive web that would allow her to climb as quickly as a spider when combined with specially treated gloves. It was a standard alchemical recipe for certain prof
essions, but her limbs still had to hold her weight.

  So she sat on the rafters, arms and legs still burning from exertion as she waited for the residue on the walls to dissolve. Most people wouldn’t be paying attention to the support beams or rafters of the old classroom, but if anyone were to notice, it would be these people.

  Patiently, Petal settled in to wait.

  She guessed it had been two hours or so when the professor finally entered the classroom. He was a sleepy-looking young man with a floppy wool hat and spectacles that took up his entire face. He arrived early, settling notes on a podium and setting up a collapsible table to hold some alchemical gear. Clearly, he was preparing for some kind of a demonstration.

  She pulled out the tiny spyglass she had borrowed from Captain Calder. He only knew that she was doing alchemical research and had been happy to contribute to her efforts.

  So long as he got his spyglass back unaltered.

  Petal had been a little offended by that assumption, not that she had said so out loud. If she treated the spyglass, it would be to make it more effective. Some glass cleaner or…or, wait, there were Kameira with incredible eyesight. Surely there would have to be some kind of extract that would allow you to borrow their sight through glass. Maybe if it could be Awakened…

  She chewed on the thought for a few minutes as the professor prepared. Slowly, his students began to fill the room.

  The students weren’t as young as she might have expected. All looked older than she was, the youngest in the second half of their twenties, and a handful looked like they must be grandparents. The sun was setting, and most of them were dressed for jobs. Not all scholarly academic jobs, either; over there, she saw a woman in a flour-spotted apron who had to be a baker.

  This wasn’t an official class of Kanatalia’s grand Alchemical Academy. It was a collection of amateur alchemists coming to learn from a Guild professional.

  Technically, Petal only counted as a journeyman alchemist by Kanatalia standards. Her master had removed her from consideration instead of sponsoring her, but by that time, the damage had already been done. She was in love with alchemy.

  She had continued mixing, brewing, and testing solutions of her own since the day she had been cut off. She couldn’t stop now. There were too many lessons left to learn, so she picked up alchemy treatises or guides wherever she could, attending every alchemical lecture she could find at every port The Testament visited.

  Where possible, she paid her own way. Where impossible, she snuck in. Or eavesdropped with a heavily invested ear-horn. Or drilled a hole in the neighboring wall. Or bribed one of the attendees for a transcript.

  There was usually a way.

  Today, the professor was picking up a series on the history of augmentary potions and their regulation. Tucked away in a corner of the rafters, she scribbled furious notes; this was a specific area of interest for her.

  After the better part of an hour on the context and history, most of which Petal was familiar with, he finally got to the demonstration.

  The young, bespectacled professor held up a tiny vial of bright red liquid. “This is a sample of blood provided by the Champion’s Guild, preserved in a fresh liquid state.”

  A murmur of appreciation ran through the crowd. Champion blood was a valuable prize; it held proprietary alchemical secrets relating to the process by which Champions were created. Though the Champion’s Guild had to cooperate with Kanatalia to procure and produce some of those substances, they still kept their precise formula a secret.

  They parted with their blood only reluctantly, especially to alchemists. Petal had read stories of Guild alchemists who had exhumed Champion bodies in order to examine the organs directly.

  Those alchemists had, one and all, been caught and…discouraged from pursuing their research further.

  The professor hurried to reassure them. “As I said, this is official business. We’ll not pry too deeply into the secrets of the Champions—not that we could, with only a few drops of blood. We’re going to learn how to distill the Kameira extract inside this blood to create a potion that will briefly allow a mere mortal to taste the power of a Champion.”

  Petal shivered in excitement.

  It became clear soon after that the professor was exaggerating; Champions relied on an intricate network of body modification supported by years of training and adaptation, and there was no way to provide anything of that level in a single bottle. Even if there were, an ordinary human body would tear itself to pieces under the strain.

  But the fact remained, as he demonstrated, that it was possible to extract the physical powers of a Champion and use them to temporarily enhance someone else.

  Which he illustrated by having the grandmotherly baker quaff a small vial of the completed solution and then crush a wooden desk to splinters with her bare hands. She stood straighter than she had before, her eyes clearer, and she laughed like a little girl as she backflipped from a standing position and landed exactly where she’d started.

  The possibilities sent Petal’s mind whirling. The process the professor demonstrated was too complicated to follow after one demonstration; she’d have to practice. Even once she did, he made it clear that the required ingredients were exotic and expensive.

  But the most exotic and expensive ingredient was the blood of a Champion, and she just so happened to live on a ship with a Champion of its own. And he was chock full of blood.

  She began writing down ideas, inspired. If a temporary enhancement was possible, it was within the realm of possibility that permanent changes could be made with nothing more than potions.

  Alchemists had known for centuries already that, if you abused potions to the point of addiction for too many years, they could permanently modify your body as though through surgery.

  The principle was a cornerstone of certain treatments, though usually only as a last resort. There were always side effects.

  Maybe someday, one bottle could make you a Champion. Maybe that was already how it worked, and the Champion’s Guild just didn’t want everyone to know. Maybe…

  Petal blinked and looked up. Night had fallen, and at some point she must have waited for all the students to pack up, descended from the rafters into an empty classroom, and left.

  She inferred this from context, as she remembered none of it.

  She was wandering the streets of Kalvin’s Rest, a port town in northern Erin where she knew no one. There were only a handful of locals still on the wide streets, and several of those gave her odd looks as she shook and clutched her notepad close.

  She had gotten too absorbed. This happened sometimes. She was only vaguely aware of the passage of time when she drifted into her own head. Now, she found herself in a strange place hours after she said she’d return.

  Petal slunk back into the shadows between a squat brick building and a place that looked like a saloon. Raucous laughter came from within, and she felt no desire to investigate further. She had to make it back to the ship.

  Then a voice she knew cut through the laughter.

  “You’re just meeting out here in the open, are you?” Jyrine sounded amused. “Children hide their secret clubs better than you.”

  A man’s laughing voice responded, his consonants noticeably slurring together, and Petal followed him around to the other side of the presumed saloon.

  Jyrine stood surrounded by four men, and she was by far the youngest and shortest person there. The least of the men was twice her size, and just watching him, Petal started to shake.

  The loudest of the men was brown-haired and red-faced, and Petal didn’t like the look of him at all. He gestured too broadly with his hands, he was clearly drunk, and he looked Jyrine up and down with an openly hungry expression.

  The other three didn’t give off the same sense of danger as that one, but they were still technically surrounding Jyrine. Did the girl know how much danger she was in?

  “Well, you’ll have to lead the way. Unlike you boys, I have som
eone waiting for me at home.” Jyrine’s earrings gleamed emerald in the starlight as she nodded deeper into the alley. Which…now that Petal noticed, opened up onto something that looked like a cave.

  How did that happen? Had someone hollowed out the stone wall of a building? No, the stone shouldn’t be more than a foot thick. Not nearly enough for a cave. And she was sure the alley had ended in a wall just a moment ago.

  Petal pulled her head back around the edge of the wall, taking deep breaths and gathering up her courage. It took her enough effort to talk to strangers at all, and she hated confrontation, but she couldn’t leave Jyrine alone with these outsiders. Petal had to be the older sister.

  Gripping her spirits tight, Petal stepped firmly into the mouth of the alley.

  “…go of her,” she mumbled.

  Two men, including the red-faced rude one, stared at her in surprise. The alley now ended in a wall. Jyrine and the other two men were gone.

  What had happened to the cave?

  Where was Jyrine?

  The drunken leader glared at her, his expression darkening. “What are you looking for, little girl?”

  Petal’s mouth stuck open, her lips quivering. Jyrine was gone.

  The man’s scowl deepened, and he seized her by the left wrist. He shook her like a doll, demanding her attention.

  It felt like Petal couldn’t get a deep enough breath.

  “What are you looking for, I said! You spying out here? You spying on us?”

  Petal tried to push air through paralyzed lungs to make a breath. “I…I’m a…”

  With her one free hand, she withdrew her alchemist’s goggles from inside the pouch that hung from her waist. She waved them around, pushing them against her eyes in proof.

  “…alchemist,” she managed at last.

  The rude man shoved her away, still glaring at her. “Get out and don’t ask questions. Go!”

  “That was my friend.” Petal’s voice was still unsteady, but she was proud of herself for managing the statement clearly. “Where is she?”