Of Kings and Killers Read online

  —Myths and Legends of Imperial History, Volume Two

  three years ago

  Calder was met on the dock by a tall, tanned woman dressed head-to-toe in orange feathers. She looked down on him with an expression of cold superiority.

  “Captain Marten, the Guild Head requires your presence at the chapter house immediately.”

  Calder coughed out a cloud of ash.

  This woman, Varia Selethir, was Cheska Bennett’s quartermaster. She had made it clear many times that she had no respect for Calder and couldn’t wait for the day when he collapsed under the burden of his debt and fled the Navigator’s Guild. He was certain that she would take her duty to hunt him down with uncomfortable glee.

  Whenever he met Varia, he tried to put on his best face. Today…wasn’t his best.

  He was covered head-to-toe in a layer of black soot that no amount of ocean water had manage to dampen, let alone wipe away. A sentient ash cloud had chased The Testament across half the Aion after their last assignment, giggling like a giant baby all the way. After vomiting all over them, the cloud had laughed its way into the distance.

  At first, they had been relieved to see the back of it. Until they realized that the layer of black grit all over them refused to leave their skin.

  “Your pardon, Quartermaster, but you can see I am not quite presentable at the moment. My crew and I could use a bath or five. Maybe a few days under a waterfall with some sandpaper. Do you know of anyone who might be Soulbound to a bar of soap?”

  Varia’s smile stretched a little further. “Regrettably, Captain Marten, this is a request of terrible urgency. I’ll have to insist.”

  Calder’s eyes moved to Varia’s fingers, which were twitching inside their orange feather-covered gloves. She was a Soulbound herself, bound to a Vessel that let her do truly unexpected things with flames, and she would embrace any excuse to singe Calder’s backside and keep him moving.

  He gave a sigh that turned into another volcanic cough. Cheska wouldn’t have sent her quartermaster to round him up unless she really needed him, as she knew Varia wouldn’t let him get away.

  He was sure that she wouldn’t have sent the woman just to torment him. Cheska didn’t hate him. He thought.

  “Andel,” Calder called, “round up the crew.”

  Andel popped his head up from the deck of The Testament, his normally spotless suit stained a greasy gray-black. “Aye, Captain.”

  Varia held up a hand as though admiring the bright plumage of her glove. “Just you, Captain. I wouldn’t want to keep the rest of your crew from the bathhouse.”

  Andel’s sigh of relief was loud enough to represent Calder’s entire crew.

  The Capital’s Navigator chapter house was a massive edifice that appeared to be made entirely from the wreckage of ancient ships. Polished wooden prows jutted from the buttresses of the building, the windows were portholes, and several masts rose from the roof bearing flags instead of sails.

  The moon-in-sun emblem of the Empire stood tallest, the Navigator’s Wheel representing his Guild came next, and the pure black flag representing the Long Mourning after the Emperor’s death was mounted in the lowest position.

  A giant golden ship’s wheel—five times life-size—had been posted over the entry doors to the chapter house. It stared down at him with a carved golden eye whose pupil was a dark sapphire. It managed to look regal and majestic instead of unsettling.

  The doors were propped open, admitting a steady stream of traffic in both directions, and it seemed that every visitor from all over the world stopped to stare at the well-baked Navigator Captain walking among them.

  Varia took her time, strolling through the doors as though she had all afternoon, letting everyone take a good long look at Calder. For his part, Calder felt as though he left a black footprint and a cloud of ash with every step, though that wasn’t actually true. Only a few specks of black dust fell behind him.

  It was an annoying reminder of how supernaturally adhesive the soot was. If it didn’t start falling off on its own soon, he was going to have to allow Petal to try her solution. She assured him that, while it was acid, it should have only a minimal effect on most skin types.

  Maybe he could scrape himself clean with a knife.

  After a parade that seemed to last most of the year, Varia finally ushered him past a goggle-eyed secretary and into an office bigger than The Testament’s hold.

  Cheska spent relatively little time in her office compared to most Guild Heads, as she preferred to stay on the water. Her office reflected that. It was stacked with treasures, collectibles, and memorabilia that she’d picked up all over the Aion Sea.

  A golden idol of some chubby, humanoid Elder shared desk space with a stack of leather-bound books filled with bookmarks. An old, yellowed map of Vandenyas covered most of one wall, pinned in place by four unique daggers. A stuffed two-headed owl was set on a shelf beneath a glass case next to a silver anchor the size of Calder’s hand and a jar of mismatched inhuman eyes floating in alchemical preservative.

  Not all of these had been brought back by Cheska herself; she had inherited some from her predecessor. But each of these items had a story behind it, and she would much prefer to tell you that story rather than discuss current business. Usually.

  Today, she looked to have been trapped behind her desk. She scribbled furiously at a stack of papers, her bright orange hair hanging in a tangled mess around her head. She wore a stained white shirt, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, rumpled as though she’d worn it for days. A worn blue jacket hung from the chair behind her, curled-up papers sticking out of its pockets.

  “What have you got for me?” Cheska asked before the door had fully opened.

  “Captain Calder Marten,” Varia announced.

  At the first syllable out of Varia’s mouth, Cheska’s head snapped up. She pushed herself to her feet, dropping her pen, which rolled off the desk and to the floor.

  Her intense gaze startled Calder. Was she that upset that he had walked into her office covered in ash? It was Varia’s fault, really. He should have waited outside. He started to brush himself off, but froze when he realized leaving ash all over her office would only make things worse.

  Cheska was stalking up to him now, her eyes fevered. When she reached him, she grabbed a fistful of his soot-caked shirt. He flinched, anticipating her seizing whatever was nearby and beating him across the head with it.

  Instead, she wrenched him closer, falling into him so her forehead rested against his shoulder. “Finally,” she breathed. “Finally.”

  Of all the ways that Calder had expected to be greeted, this was not one of them.

  Her head shuddered against him, and he thought she might be crying, so he slowly started to move his arms around her. It was so bizarrely out of character for her that he couldn’t quite fit the idea into his head, but if Cheska was crying, then something terrible must have happened.

  Before he managed it, Cheska threw her head back and laughed, a desperate and hollow sound. “Light and life, I’m free.”

  “Did you not know I was joining you today?” Calder asked. “I thought Varia had come to get me on your orders.” She’d acted like his presence was an unexpected birthday present.

  “In fact, I noticed you coming into harbor myself and anticipated the Guild Head’s command.” Varia’s smile was gleaming.

  Calder resolved to find an opportunity to dump her into the ocean.

  Cheska released him, brushing her hand clean and making no mention of the black grit covering him. “You were right to do it. Kelarac’s bushy beard, I can breathe again.”

  “You can’t be that happy to see me. You’ll make Jerri jealous.”

  She gave him a grin that he was much more used to seeing. “Why would you need to be jealous when you own something nobody wants?” Without looking, she hopped up backwards onto her desk, sitting on top of some very important-looking papers. He wondered if the ink had dried yet.

  “I’
ll give it to you straight: Regent Loreli has been stuck to my backside like a barnacle, and until I pry her off, I can’t leave this room. Too much to do. So I’ve got another mission for you.”

  Calder stiffened. Carrying out a mission for a Regent sounded a little too much like carrying out an assignment for the Emperor himself. The Regents had all been personal friends of the Emperor, after all.

  There was every possibility that they might want him to work for free, and he was already trapped in debt for the rest of his natural life. If he started taking on trips for no more than expenses, his grandchildren would stay in the poorhouse.

  “Too busy to scrape barnacles today, Cheska. I haven’t even finished my report from my last mission. You might have to take this one yourself.”

  She glared at him. “You think I wouldn’t have jumped at this the instant I got a chance? We can’t have people see The Eternal on the hunt for the Emperor’s crown. They’d think I was setting myself up as Empress.”

  Calder’s mind suddenly drifted a thousand miles from his body.

  ALL HAIL THE EMPEROR OF THE WORLD. A voice older than human civilization had shaken his mind with that declaration.

  Every word from the Great Elder carried volumes of meaning. One image carried clearly by the title “Emperor of the World” had been “He Who Wears the Crown.”

  Ach’magut had given Calder an image of himself wearing the Emperor’s gold crown. It had lodged in his imagination for years.

  “The crown is…gone?” Calder asked, and his voice came out as more of a croak. Fortunately, anyone would react the same upon hearing that the Imperial crown had been lost, so his tone raised no suspicions.

  Cheska threw her hands in the air. “Right? You wouldn’t think it’d be hard to find! It’s been missing since the night of the Emperor’s death, may his soul fly free, but Loreli dug it up a couple months ago. Ach’magut only knows where she found it. She hired us to ship it to Jorin so he could bury it somewhere with proper security, so I assigned it to The Reliable.”

  Calder was only somewhat familiar with Captain Tommison of The Reliable, but he knew the capabilities of the ship. It looked like a floating, animated conch shell that had somehow grown into the shape of a sea vessel, and Guild legend suggested that it could not be sunk.

  “He didn’t make it,” Calder guessed.

  “I’m going to make him rename the ship. The Limping Lady, maybe. The Snail.”

  “That one’s better,” Varia put in, reminding Calder that the quartermaster was still there. “Snails have shells.”

  “The Snail it is. We wouldn’t have even known Tommison was lost instead of taking the long way around, but we received word this morning that another captain spotted his ship tangled up by a roaming island only a week ago.”

  Calder’s caution spiked at the mention of the roaming islands; some of them were predatory. “Which island?”

  “New one. No name. Seems to have just grabbed them.”

  So the Regent had hired the Navigators to transport the crown, and Loreli had been hounding Cheska for a report on the ship’s whereabouts when it had failed to arrive on time. Cheska had been certain the ship was just late until this morning, when she’d learned the worst had happened. It all lined up except for one thing.

  “Why give this to me?” he asked. “I thought you’d assign this to the first captain who could raise sails.”

  “I would,” Cheska said. “That’s why this is a gift from the Emperor himself. I was going to send the fastest ship available by sunset tonight. Your timing couldn’t be better.”

  Calder again remembered the voice of the Great Elder, the thousand eyes on waving stalks. He pictured an uncountable number of tentacles, all pulling strings designed to move him like a puppet even years in the future.

  “I understand the gravity of the situation,” he said, “but surely reliability is more important than speed. If the crown was stolen, it’s already stolen. If the crew’s dead, they’re already dead. We need someone who’s guaranteed to get there and back, unless…we need to get there first.”

  As soon as he came to the conclusion, he saw confirmation in Cheska’s eyes. But it was her quartermaster who spoke.

  “The secret is out, which is one reason why the Guild Head’s pen hasn’t stopped moving today. The Luminians know about the crown, of course. Regent Loreli keeps nothing from them, and we have reports that they have prepared ordinary ships for a long voyage. A few of the more ambitious among the Capital elite have bribed some Navigator captains or started to form their own fleets. Rumor has it that the alchemists are moving, funded by Bareius himself, and the Blackwatch…”

  Varia tugged on her orange gloves as though to reassure herself, giving a distant shudder. “…the Head of the Blackwatch paid us a visit this morning.”

  As a former Watchman, Calder longed to mock the woman for shuddering at the mere mention of the Blackwatch, just to get some revenge for the way he’d been treated. But he couldn’t bring himself to say a word.

  He knew what it was like to meet with Bliss.

  The quartermaster continued: “She informed us that the agents of human interests are not the only rivals we have.”

  This time, Calder shuddered with her.

  He would have taken on this assignment regardless of the circumstances merely for the opportunity to make off with the crown himself. If he played his cards perfectly, he might be able to walk away with his position intact, but there was still the possibility of taking the crown and fleeing Imperial justice into the Aion.

  As Ach’magut had promised him, he would end up with the crown on his head one way or another.

  But a realistic estimation of the dangers still sobered him. He didn’t need the Emperor’s crown in order to take his place, it would just be a valuable tool. He could not give up the lives of his crew.

  “We can be ready to sail by sunset,” Calder promised. “But I need to tell my crew it will be worth it.”

  Considering this was a mission involving an Imperial relic, he was certain he could get five hundred goldmarks from Cheska, though he would settle for a hundred. It would make a significant dent in his five-thousand-goldmark debt, which he had whittled down to about four-and-a-half thousand over the last few years.

  Cheska waved a hand. “You bring back the crown and the Guild will wipe out your debt to the throne.”

  For a second, Calder forgot to breathe.

  Varia gave him a disdainful look, as though she looked down on him for valuing money so highly, but she could take a one-way dive to Kelarac for all he cared. The Guild Head was offering to clear up the debt that he had expected to hang over him for the rest of his life.

  But that did require the crown. He had been promised the position of Emperor, so he strongly suspected that he would end up with the crown regardless of what else happened. Beyond all that, he wanted it.

  The Guild wouldn’t let him get away with that so easily. If he returned and reported the crown missing, there would be Readers crawling all over his ship within seconds. But he’d have time to solve that problem while on the mission.

  When he could speak again, he said, “That’s an expensive gamble. What if I travel all the way out there and the crown is already gone?”

  “A thousand goldmarks just for making the trip,” Cheska promised him. “The Regent is footing the bill. Another hundred for each member of Tommison’s crew you bring back, and five hundred for The Reliable. That’s on top of the crown, which clears up your debt of…I want to say forty-five hundred?”

  She glanced out the window, where the sun had started to fall. “Just say yes already, Calder. Clock’s ticking.”

  Calder ran back to The Testament, leaving tiny particles of soot crumbling into the air behind him.

  Jerri knelt in the damp basement of a secret meeting-house in the Capital. It was dangerous to meet directly in the Capital, though after the Emperor’s death it had become more and more common. The Sleepless cell here still riske
d being picked up by a passing Magister or Watchman, but all the Guilds were stretched thin these days.

  The Empire needed to be saved now more than ever.

  She had never been more aware of the world’s need for unity than she was at that moment, with her knees pressed to the ground and her head bowed toward the icy rift in space.

  The voices of the Sleepless cabal poured from the void, translated imperfectly by Elderspawn messengers.

  “The Emperor’s crown—”

  “—symbol—”

  “—circlet—"

  “—authority—”

  “—is found once more. You will be sent. Retrieve it. There will be friends—”

  “—allies—”

  “—servants—”

  “—tools—"

  “—at your disposal when you make landfall. It is the will of the Great Ones that you bring the crown to us. Do so, and we will restore the world to its natural order.”

  Jerri’s hands were shaking with excitement and she couldn’t suppress the grin on her face, so she kept her head down, lest the Elderspawn report back to the Sleepless leaders that she was taking the task lightly.

  That was far from the truth. She understood the weight of the Emperor’s crown better than they did, and she very much doubted that it was the will of the Great Ones that the cabal have the Imperial relic. She suspected it was merely the will of the Sleepless leaders themselves.

  Well, she had a better idea of where the crown should end up.

  “Complete your task at any cost,” the chorus of Elders emphasized, and this time the whispering voices echoed exactly that:

  “At any cost.”

  “At any cost.”

  “At. Any. Cost.”

  “At any cost,” Jerri repeated.

  Chapter Five

  I wake Estyr Six to fight, not to talk.

  —The Emperor

  present day