Of Kings and Killers Read online

An object just performed its function better based on the strength, focus, and quantity of Intent reinforcing it, and the crown’s function was to represent authority.

  No one questioned him for a second. The Guards pinned the Luminian knight to the stairs, disarming her of sword and shield in an instant.

  “We need the Vessels,” Calder called, and the fox-eared Guard shouted for her subordinates to clear the way. They pressed themselves to either side, and the Guard ran him forward, the others falling in formation behind him.

  Was this what it was like to really rule the Empire?

  I should wear this crown more often.

  They escorted him down to the bottom of the tower, and on the way he found another restrained Luminian knight and one missing from his post. That one must have figured out what was happening from the sounds above.

  For now, Calder had the advantage, because he was one of the few who knew they were at war. That advantage would become less valuable with every passing second.

  So when he returned to the open room at the bottom of the tower, he drew himself up and focused on the crown as he commanded, “Release our weapons.”

  The Magister scrambled for her staff decorated with blue crystals, hurrying to obey. Two of the Witnesses fell to their knees and the other two ran over to the boxes, prying at the lids with their fingers.

  The blindfolded Champion smirked and uncrossed her arms, casually drawing her sword. “How about everyone stays where they are?”

  Loyalty to the Empire was one thing, but self-preservation was a powerful instinct. The Magister and the Witnesses froze, looking between Calder and the Champion.

  The Stonefang Kameira had never flinched at Calder’s command, and the giant ruby-striped dog growled menacingly at the Witnesses who had dared to touch the boxes.

  He had made the command too general. In his experience using the crown, once he had determined who would listen to the crown’s orders, he got better results when addressing people individually.

  If he spoke to many people at once, then somewhere in the back of their minds, they might think, “He’s not necessarily talking to me. These other people will release the weapons.”

  He had to leave no room for those thoughts, so he focused on the Champion.

  Calder drew himself up, staring straight into the cloth over her eyes, and tapped a hand to his crown. “Champion, we are under attack. As the Steward of the Imperial Throne, I command you to release our weapons so that we can defend ourselves.”

  He really wished he knew her name. Or at least that he could look her in the eyes.

  Her sword came up as though poised to break open a nearby box…then it kept rising until it pointed straight at Calder.

  “I don’t see any way giving you more weapons is going to make things better. Until the Witnesses give me the go-ahead, they’re staying where they are.”

  Calder turned to the nearest Chronicler and Silent One. “Witnesses, tell—”

  “Not those Witnesses. You know that.”

  He did, but it had been worth a try.

  By now, the Imperial Guard had filled up the stairs behind him and spilled into the room. They braced their weapons, looking to him for orders. He could have them rush the guardians and maybe open the boxes.

  If he did, the Champion would grind them to pieces.

  Maybe she could be overwhelmed by the sheer weight of bodies, but most—if not all—of the Guards would be killed.

  For a moment, he was very conscious of the weight of the crown on his head. Not just the physical weight, but the significance.

  In this moment, he had the authority of the Emperor under his command. What did he want to do with it?

  Calder pulled the crown off and addressed the Champion. If overwhelming Intent wouldn’t work, he would try sincerity. “Please, madam, would you tell me your name?”

  Her smirk remained in place. “You can call me Twelve.”

  Was this some kind of Champion joke?

  That made the third Champion to tell him to refer to them by number, and he’d never learned what it meant. There was no Champion tradition he’d ever read about that suggested they named their members in sequence, and most of the Champions he’d met didn’t have numbers for names.

  He should have asked Urzaia when he had the chance.

  “Madam Twelve, look around you.” The tower shook beneath the blows of the superhuman fighters at the top. “We were attacked. I was driven out, and now General Teach and your Guild Head, Baldezar Kern, are fighting together against Estyr Six.”

  He desperately hoped his earnest expression was making it through the blindfold. “They can’t win. Without their Vessels, they are no match for her. She will kill them, and she will come down those stairs, and she will take back her Vessels from you. She will not speak to you, she will take them by force. Please. Without your help, we have no chance.”

  Twelve’s head slowly lowered, as though under an invisible weight. As it did, her sword drifted down until it rested at her side.

  Calder’s heart lifted.

  “Nah,“ Twelve said at last. She ground the sword into the floor and leaned on it. “If the Farstriders tell me to open one of these boxes, I’ll do it. Otherwise, I’m here to draw swords on anyone who tries me.”

  Calder tried not to let his frustration show, but he shoved the crown back onto his head and turned to address the Imperial Guard. “Escort me out of here.”

  Unless the Independent Guilds had moved, they were still gathered outside the main door of the Rose Tower. But there were Guards out there too. He needed the Imperial Guard to make him an exit, or he was trapped here.

  He had to escape to get to the one person he could think of that might be able to help: Bliss.

  As the Guards formed up before the door, the ceiling collapsed.

  Kern fell to the floor with a crash, and Calder couldn’t tell if he had crashed through intentionally or if he had once again been cast down by Estyr Six. The Guild Head landed with his knees bent, and his dented armor creaked as he slowly raised himself to a standing position.

  Unhurried, he looked around, taking in the situation of the room. One half of his head was sheathed in blood and his entire body was covered in the dust of stone and plaster, but he acted as though it was all just makeup, not worth mentioning.

  He had landed among the boxes, and he took in Calder and the Imperial Guard gathered at the foot of the stairs, the Stonefang growling at him, the Magister cowering nearby, the Witnesses silently observing, and the Champion standing with her massive sword.

  He focused on her. “Yzara. I need my weapons.”

  The Stonefang could take no more. This threat had stayed among its charges for too long. It hurled itself at Kern, snarling, jaws gaping wide enough to crush a man’s skull.

  Kern caught the tiger-sized dog by the throat with one hand and hurled it behind him in a single motion.

  Twelve—or was it Yzara?—no longer looked so smug. She gripped her sword in both hands and held it up, leaning forward, ready for battle. “Sorry, Baldezar. It’s a job.”

  Once again, there came an explosion of motion from a pair of combatants too fast to clearly see. Calder flinched back from the thunder of their crash, instinctively throwing up a hand to protect himself.

  When he lowered it, the battle was over.

  Twelve lay crumpled in a heap against the wall. Her chest and stomach looked like they had been caved in, and her blood had been sprayed all over the far wall. Her ravaged chest still moved in and out, and Calder could hear a pained wheezing from all the way across the room. Her sword hung limp in her hand.

  Kern did not apologize or say anything to his fellow Guild member. Instead, he turned to the Magister, blood-spattered gauntlets held loosely at his sides.

  “Open the box.”

  The Magister didn’t have the same lethal commitment as the Champion. She hurriedly raised her crystal-speckled staff, her Intent activating the power of the Awakened object. The lid
of Kern’s box slid aside.

  Kern reached in and picked up his leather satchel. He let out a breath as he lifted it, regarding it like he would an injury.

  Calder pointed to the long stone chest containing Teach’s sword. “The rest of ours too,” he commanded the Magister.

  When she looked to the Guild Head for permission, Kern nodded.

  “Can you win?” Calder asked. There was no time for pleasantries, and he doubted Kern would appreciate them anyway.

  The Champion considered for a moment as the stone lid slid away. “Not if she gets her Vessels back.”

  Kern lifted the sheathed Tyrfang out and looked up through the hole in the ceiling, from which plaster rained down as the battle raged overhead.

  For the first time, Calder noticed that not all of the deafening sounds of battle were coming from above. Gunshots and screams rang out from all around the Rose Tower.

  The battle had begun outside.

  “Would you do me a favor, Marten?” Kern asked.

  He wasn’t watching Calder, but Calder almost couldn’t believe that the Head of the Champion’s Guild would ever ask him for anything. “Name it.”

  “Back everyone off. This is going to get messy.”

  Kern tucked Tyrfang under his arm, reaching into the leather satchel. He pulled a helmet out and somewhat awkwardly shoved it onto his head. Then he let the satchel fall to the floor, holding a pair of maces in a single hand.

  He turned to face Calder, so Calder saw his transformation.

  The helmet, carved into the aspect of a snarling bull, flared with red light as though a crimson quicklamp had been ignited within. The light shivered through every plate of the armor he wore, traveling from his neck to the bottom of his boots in an instant.

  Dim scarlet energy radiated from within the armor. It was barely noticeable, but the Intent that rolled off the Champion…

  It was bloodlust, desire for combat, distilled and focused into pure violence. Calder and the Magister both stumbled back, bowled over by the force of the Soulbound Vessel’s Intent.

  A chuckle began deep in Kern’s chest, slowly gathering and building to a wild laugh that competed with the blows from above. The laugh became a deafening roar, and suddenly Kern leaped up through the hole in the ceiling in a blur of motion.

  An instant later, an explosion sounded from the top floor. Through the window high on the wall, he saw debris raining down.

  The Magister fell to her knees, breathing heavily. “That was…I don’t…I thought we were all going to die.”

  So did Calder, but he grabbed his own sword from the freshly opened box and buckled it onto his waist. He had a job to do.

  “Open the door,” he commanded.

  The Guards hurried to obey, unbarring the doors and pulling them open.

  Immediately, the battle spilled inside.

  Guild members swarmed all over each other, stabbing and beating each other and hurling weapons of all descriptions. They were a mess of color and motion, so that he could barely tell any of them apart.

  But he didn’t have to.

  He let the Emperor’s Intent trickle down from the crown just a little.

  “RETREAT!” Calder shouted.

  The melee froze. A second later, all of them—Independents and Imperialists both—scrambled away. Allies stuck to allies, and a few took parting potshots, but in a matter of only seconds, the doors were clear.

  However, the command had been too broad. His own Guards scurried up the stairs, dove behind boxes, or hid in the corner.

  Calder tried again. Most of his attention was focused on keeping too much of the Emperor’s power from leaking through; he could already sense new memories pressing against his awareness like half-remembered dreams.

  “Imperial Guard, to me!”

  A mob of red-and-black-uniformed men and women condensed around him out of nowhere. Surrounded by their broad shoulders and inhuman limbs, he was reminded like never before of how much bigger the average Imperial Guard was compared to him.

  “Half of you protect the boxes. Don’t let Estyr get her skulls back. The rest of you: get me to Bliss.”

  They practically carried him out the door.

  The streets of the Imperial Palace had turned into a nightmare.

  The Champions, which he had been certain would put a quick end to any violence, had been set upon by gangs of alchemists with gas, darts, traps, and some kind of sprayed adhesive that kept the Champions bound to the floor.

  If that were enough to stop them, though, they wouldn’t be Champions. Calder saw mercenaries with Awakened weapons among the alchemists, as well as leashed Kameira or even Soulbound.

  Even so, the Champions strained against the poison and their bonds, and the broken bodies of many an alchemist littered the street.

  His own Guards kept him hurrying down the road, but the fellow members of their Guild were engaged with everyone, most of all the Luminian knights.

  From the bits of the fights that Calder could see, any knight was worth two or three of the Guard, catching blows on their shields and returning strikes with swords that flashed unnaturally bright.

  Eventually, numbers would carry the day for the Guards. Some of the knights had been overwhelmed in the same way as those in the Rose Tower, and they had either been bound and left in the dirt or killed and stripped of weapons and armor.

  Greenwardens were largely harmless without access to their trained Kameira, but several of them carried guns or alchemical weapons, and they moved in packs.

  Wherever Calder saw combat, he shouted for retreat. Sometimes he was drowned out by the sounds of battle and his Guards carried him past, but sometimes the crown-reinforced order stuck. Imperialists and Independents alike stopped fighting, instead scrambling for shelter with their allies.

  As they traveled, he thought he felt the battle slowly dying down. He hoped it was more than just hopeful imagination. There would never be a truly unified Empire if he had to destroy half the Guilds to build it.

  Finally, they caught sight of what they had been looking for: a flock of Blackwatch holding a building secure.

  The Guards had last seen Bliss here, but for some reason she hadn’t joined the battle yet. That much, Calder could tell on his own. The paving-stones hadn’t been turned into squids.

  The Watchmen on the doors drew sabers even though they were being approached by their supposed allies. “Stop where you are!” one shouted.

  Calder pushed his way through the Guards so they could see his face. “Where’s Bliss?”

  They traded looks and finally lowered their weapons. “Upstairs. Would you have your Guard wait here?”

  The Imperial Guard looked like they weren’t even going to slow down, but he ordered them to stay outside with the crown. “Secure the perimeter.”

  As he walked in, the older of the Watchmen leaned over to speak in his ear. “She’s having one of her bad days.”

  Calder almost stopped.

  He could always go around the Palace hunting down the packs of alchemists that were restraining Champions; he had already considered it. But he chose against it for the same reason he had before: Bliss had the potential to end the entire conflict on her own. And she was one more person who might be able to defend herself from Estyr Six.

  He squared his shoulders and marched inside.

  Following the directions of the Blackwatch, he moved deeper into what was apparently an inn. There were a number of similar buildings inside the Imperial Palace; official guests would stay in guest rooms, but visitors or family members of Palace staff could rent places like these. It was one of the many new things he’d learned since moving into the Palace himself.

  He walked up a set of stairs, passing another set of Blackwatch guards, and into a second floor filled with half a dozen rooms. All the doors were open save one.

  Before he knocked, he lifted a hand and Read the room.

  Overwhelming confusion radiated from within.

  He shook off th
e Intent, blinking rapidly to clear his sight and focus him on reality. No point hesitating now.

  He knocked on the door. Before he could hit it a second time, the door was torn open.

  Bliss had flung the door wide, face flushed and hair in disarray. Sweat ran down her face, and she looked like she could barely stand.

  When she saw Calder, she lit up. “You came! Thank you. Thank…”

  She collapsed against his chest, holding fistfuls of his shirt to keep herself upright. Her wet forehead pressed against him, burning hot.

  Horrified, he looked from Bliss to the other person in the room: his mother.

  She did not look as pleased to see him. Her Blackwatch coat was buckled tight, and she had bared an inch of her saber. He caught a glimpse of a pistol holstered at her hip, and her face was pale as she regarded the Guild Head.

  “Bliss,” she said carefully, “please back away from my son.”

  Bliss’ fingers trembled as though she were trying to release his shirt. She mumbled as she spoke. “I apologize. This is not very polite, is it?”

  One step at a time, Calder shuffled into the room, slowly shutting the door behind him. He was afraid to move too quickly, lest the Guild Head think he was shaking her off.

  With his eyes, he asked Alsa what was going on.

  She gestured subtly to her own Blackwatch coat.

  Calder glanced down at Bliss’ coat. She carried the Spear of Tharlos in there, a weapon made by the Regents from a bone they’d taken from the Great Elder of Chaos. Sometimes, as she tucked it inside, he saw it stretch or try and leave.

  This time, it throbbed visibly against the black fabric. Like a beating heart.

  Calder spoke in the most soothing tone he could manage. This might be an even greater threat than Estyr. “It’s no problem, Bliss. We’re friends, aren’t we? I’m here for whatever you need.”

  Alsa furiously shook her head, slashing a finger across her throat. That had been the wrong thing to say.

  But Bliss relaxed, breathing more deeply against him.

  “Thank you. I’m glad I can be honest with you. Now, will you please let me make everyone quiet?”

  Calder forced himself to keep breathing. She’d notice if his breath hitched. “Why do you want to do that?”