Of Dawn and Darkness

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The battle between Jarelys Teach and Jorin Maze-walker had been terrifying enough through a spyglass from a safe distance away. As Calder stood on the Gray Island docks, amidst the scattered bodies of those who hadn’t run fast enough, he found that the experience close-up was far worse.

Teach, clad in red-and-black armor, carried a matching sword. Tyrfang’s Intent was the macabre madness of a slaughterhouse, the sharp edge of an executioner’s axe, the fear of the condemned facing obliteration. It pressed against Calder’s mind with visions of blood and inescapable death, even as its aura actually darkened the ground around her. As Teach fought, desperate and defensive, the earth died with each of her retreating steps.

And Jorin advanced, following her, his own sword a twisted mirror of hers. Up close, Calder saw its defects: patches like rust or bloodstains that mired the surface of the blade. They seemed to crawl, like patches of worms, and its Intent was a knot he couldn’t begin to untangle. Like every spiteful, hateful, murderous Intent he’d ever felt, all trapped inside one weapon. Its power wasn’t as focused as Tyrfang, but it was heavier, the weight of two thousand years crashing down around Teach’s defenses. Jorin moved forward almost casually, hacking his way closer to a lethal stroke, his dark-tinted glasses flashing in the sunlight.

Mist played around their legs as they fought, and with every clash of Awakened blades, darkness and crazed Intent swallowed them. Rings of dirt blasted out whenever their swords met, as though even the dirt couldn’t bear to be so close.

And Calder was planning on walking into that.

Surely I’d be better off shooting him. He’d considered it before, but back on the ship, he hadn’t wanted to draw Jorin’s attention to The Testament for nothing more than a distant chance. Now, though…

Calder pulled the pistol from his belt and fired.

It wasn’t likely to be a lethal shot. At thirty yards, even someone much more skilled would need their share of luck to kill someone with a single bullet. Foster was always mocking his abilities, trying to goad him into practice, but today it seemed his luck was good. Jorin staggered back, struck in one arm, and for an instant Teach was able to push him back.

A pink light shone within the wound, as though Jorin hid a quicklamp in his coat, and an instant later he was as strong as ever. The light continued to shine, giving Calder hope that he’d at least inflicted some injury.

Then the Regent flicked his gaze over to Calder, just for an instant, and a river of dark Intent whipped out. That was all the attention Calder warranted, and it would be more than enough to kill him and dissolve his body. But Calder had prepared a defense.

He hoped.

As he’d done once before, Calder drew his own Awakened sword and braced his Intent through Kelarac’s mark. His Intent seemed to solidify, as though propped up by a bigger, more permanent force. He felt himself steady, and as Jorin’s power struck him, it was first lessened by the aura of Calder’s orange-spotted blade. The strange energy invested in this weapon seemed to be toxic to Elderspawn, and it did an admirable job of reducing Jorin’s attack.

So when the wave of shadow struck him, slamming up against his Intent fortified by Kelarac’s mark, Calder expected to survive. He didn’t expect to push through it so easily. It felt like pushing against a freezing wind blowing off of a graveyard, stinking and repulsive; it wasn’t pleasant, but it certainly wasn’t difficult. Resisting Tyrfang’s aura had been much harder back in the Imperial Palace, and judging by the way Teach had been repeatedly pushed back, Jorin’s weapon couldn’t be weaker.

Calder opened himself up to Read the atmosphere around him, and instantly understood. The Emperor’s white armor. He was wrapped in protective Intent so ancient and solid that it defended even his essence, letting him march forward even under Jorin’s attack.

That worked, he realized, with no small measure of disbelief. Now, can I take a direct hit? He decided not to test that.

Jorin still wasn’t watching him as he jogged closer, evidently having dismissed him with the single attack. Calder’s heart pounded. He only had to distract the Regent, to occupy him long enough to give Teach a chance to kill him.

Calder was close enough to begin his strike, stepping forward to drive his Awakened cutlass into Jorin’s side, before the Regent saw him. Jorin’s head jerked back in disbelief, and he barely managed to avoid a cut from Teach as he back-stepped away from Calder.

Together, Calder and the Guild Head forced Jorin onto the defensive. It wasn’t pleasant, fighting within both corrosive auras—it was like forcing his way through a lake of raw sewage—but it was bearable. Between his own sword, Kelarac’s mark, and the Emperor’s armor, he could stand among two of the greatest fighters in Imperial history.

For about five seconds, Calder had never felt more powerful.

Then Jorin blasted him with Intent, another gust of freezing wind, staggering him in his tracks. The Regent followed up with a slash to Calder’s face, making him jerk his cutlass up, but it was a feint. Jorin reversed the strike to land on Teach.

And it did land. Teach had thrown herself out of position to protect Calder, only to take the cut on her armored left arm.

The sound of the strike was a satisfying clang of metal-on-metal, and for a second Calder believed that her armor had saved her. Then he saw the dark scratch on its surface and heard her agonized scream.

He had to shoulder-tackle her out of the way to protect her from Jorin’s follow-up. She never lost her grip on Tyrfang, even as she tumbled to the ground and rolled away.

“You’re the seedling Emperor, then,” Jorin said, panting. “Let’s have you go a round or two.”

Calder attacked first. As Loreli, another Regent, had once put it: “In a duel, the defender is losing.” Jorin swept his black blade in a lazy arc, as though he meant to slice the orange-spotted cutlass in half.

When Calder turned the hit, Jorin’s eyebrows climbed up into his hat. “Here now, where’d you get that sword?”

Instead of responding, Calder attacked the man from the left, opening up some space, trying to force him away from Teach’s body. If he gave her some time, she might recover, though her low, pained moans didn’t give him much hope.

The Regent tolerated that for a few exchanges, then he lost patience. He reversed the sword in both hands, driving his blade into the ground.

All around Calder, the earth blasted away into loose black grit. He lost his footing, tumbling to the ground, shielding his mouth and eyes with his arm. Even when the air cleared he couldn’t find purchase, coughing in the rising dust-cloud, trying to clear the dirt from his eyes.

Jorin walked up, a hazy figure, calm and unhurried. “If you survive, we’ll have a chat about your sword. But I don’t mean to pressure you. Life is such a brief candle.” He raised his blade.

And, as Calder had experienced several times before, he was suddenly somewhere else. The world shifted around him, as quick as a vanishing stage curtain.

Now, he stood on a floor of polished white marble, and he was feeling remarkably better: he was warm, and clean, and not at all covered in blackened grit. He stood in a shrine of some kind, though where there would usually be a statue of the Emperor was instead a towering marble figure of some kind of warped fish-creature. There were no walls, only rows of columns looking out onto the sea.

The sea stretched all around him. This shrine must have been on some tiny island on the Aion, because he didn’t see any other land, only black storm-tossed waves. The wind outside was wicked, stirring up wild surf, as black clouds danced and lightning lit the night.

Other than the lightning, the scene was illuminated only by a smoky torch dimly flickering over the statue’s head. Calder felt that he should have been freezing, but somehow the wind stayed a perfectly comfortable temperature.

“I once intended to have this built,” Kelarac said. “It’s in the center of what you now call the Aion Sea.” He stood looking up at the statue, just as Calder remembered him: a fashionable Heartlander, his thin beard neatly trimmed, clothes just as the Emperor would have worn them, rings on every finger and waves of jewels on his neck. A few of his teeth gleamed gold as he smiled, and his most prominent feature—the polished band of steel over his eyes—reflected the strikes of lightning.

“Why didn’t you?” Calder asked politely. He was still trying to be considerate, out of respect for a massively powerful being, but in truth his frustration had grown. Kelarac was behind Jerri’s actions somehow, but he still pretended to be Calder’s friend.

“Timing. It’s all about the proper place, isn’t it? The right time, the precise location. Temporal or spatial, if the place is off even slightly, then it might as well have never existed at all…”

Calder let the Great Elder muse privately. In their previous meetings, he had never waxed philosophical, instead sticking close to business. It could mean he was ready to give Calder a gift, or to eat him alive.

“You didn’t destroy the Optasia,” Kelarac noted.

“Yet.”

“You believe it would destroy you.”

“Would it?” Not that Calder would take the word of the Soul Collector, but a straight answer would be nice.

Kelarac’s golden teeth flashed. “That depends on a number of shifting factors. Place, as I said. However, I can assure you that even though the throne might be unsuitable, the rest of the network is very much intact. I can find a use for it.”

“Of that, sir, I have no doubt.” Calder made the words sound respectful instead of wry.

“In exchange for your word that you will deliver the Optasia to me, I can deliver some immediate help. Allies that can save you from your current situation.”

Calder’s mind flashed to the strange Navigator ship, the one decorated in gold. “Those were your people waiting outside the Gray Island?”

Kelarac folded ringed fingers together. “They’re nearby.”

“And they can actually save me from the Regent?”

“Oh yes.”

Calder had been trying to stretch the time as much as possible, but he only had one answer. “I’m sorry. I can’t.” The price was too high.

Delivering the Heart of Nakothi was one thing; he’d given a piece of one Elder to another. If Kelarac had been willing to dig a little, he could have excavated a heart on his own. But as far as Calder was concerned, that had been an equitable trade…and even now, it didn’t weigh easily on him. He often wondered what horrors Kelarac could perpetrate with a piece of the Dead Mother’s power.

But instead of flying into a rage, as Calder had half expected, Kelarac nodded. “Too high a price. I think you estimate the value of the Emperor’s device too favorably. Soon, it may not be worth the metal from which it was cast. But I wouldn’t be much of a collector if I didn’t know how to haggle, would I?”

Kelarac’s smile was friendly, but Calder reminded himself that it came from a Great Elder. “Did you have another price in mind?”

“Always, Reader of Memory. Always. You recall, I’m sure, the Consultant called Shera.”

There were a few scenes in his life that Calder would never forget. They were burned into his brain as if by acid. One of them, to his eternal regret, was the image of Shera pushing Jerri over The Testament’s railing and into the ocean. He could still see Jerri’s eyes as she fell; they were locked on his, still carrying shame and terror.

“I do,” he said.

“Then perhaps you’ll find this price more palatable. I will send you my allies. In exchange, you and they will cut your way through the Consultant’s Guild and execute Shera without mercy or compunction.” His calm had slipped briefly, his voice vicious. “Afterwards, if her body were to find its way down to me, I would be…even more generous.”

Calder watched the Elder, chewing on what he’d just heard. What did it mean that Kelarac valued Shera only slightly less than the Emperor’s throne? That he would give up possession of a worldwide network of Intent amplification that could turn any Reader into an army, in exchange for guaranteeing Shera’s death?

What did the Elders care about one Consultant?

“The last time I saw Jerri,” Calder said quietly, “she asked me much the same thing.”

“In some ways, she is a wise woman. In others, she is still foolish, but here she is wise.”

What had Jerri said? That someone had warned her how dangerous Shera was. Someone who had gotten to her in her cell, and who had returned her Soulbound Vessel to her.

Kelarac. It had been Kelarac all along. Calder wasn’t surprised, but he felt as though his eyes had been opened for the first time. He broadened his smile until it was almost painful.

“I think…not. I think I’ll take my chances against Jorin.”

The Great Elder’s own smile had faded, until he looked regretful. “There are wiser courses, Calder Marten.”

“If your allies are nearby, tell them to stay away. I have no use for you, you Elder-spawned filth, and you can shove yourself back into the hole you came from.” His anger built with every word. “I’m tired of dancing like a puppet for you, so I’m cutting the strings. If you show yourself in front of me again, we’ll see if the Emperor’s armory might, by chance, have something that can make a Great Elder bleed. You turned my wife against me, and light and life, I’ll make sure you pay for it.”

His voice was ringing out by the end, until his shouts filled the storm-lit shrine, and he was panting as he finished. The dream didn’t go away. The marble under his feet remained as solid as ever.

“You’ll be the one to pay the price, little King,” Kelarac said quietly. “Yours is a sad defiance, because defiance requires a choice, and you have none. You are an actor on a stage, speaking lines that have been said a thousand, thousand times before.”

Calder tried to respond, but his throat was stuck. The shrine and the storm faded into darkness, until all that remained was the gleam of the Great Elder’s blindfold. And the echo of his voice:

“Dance on your string, little puppet. Dance…”

Calder returned to reality caked in dust, with Jorin advancing, raising his sword for a strike. He scrambled backwards with hands and feet, trying to stand, knowing that it was all but hopeless.

Still, he’d defied one of the Great Elders to its face. The stories were filled with noble fools who tried that. They usually died horribly, but Calder found the feeling strangely liberating. He might die, but at least he wouldn’t die a slave.

He raised his sword to block the oncoming blow, hoping desperately that the Emperor’s armor would be able to take a hit. When Jorin struck, Calder had no choice but to meet the edge of the Regent’s blade with his own. The clash of Intent seared into his mind, and he slid backwards another few feet.

The dust had cleared away, leaving the sky shockingly blue…except for the dark crack spreading through it. An opening into the void. A fingerhold for the Elders, probably. And below that, the Aion Sea, with a Navigator’s ship just beside him. It loomed over them, so that he was about to die in its shadow.

Perfect. I’m going to die under a Navigator’s ship, and it’s not even mine. Those gold-edged sails were too gaudy for his taste.

Jorin walked forward to finish Calder, but his expression changed. He snapped his head up, looking at the ship, and then leaped backwards. Something—someone—enormous slammed into the ground where he’d been standing. A man in slate-gray armor, with a pair of maces strapped to his belt. He carried a helmet under one arm, leaving his head bare. His hair was black, with wings of silver at the edges.

Baldesar Kern, Head of the Champion’s Guild.

“I see you changed your mind,” Calder said, as soon as he’d caught his breath. The relief was flooding his mind, filling him with elation.

Kern shrugged one shoulder without turning around. “Not quite. I told you, I wouldn’t fight for someone I didn’t trust. If you’re willing to stand up to a Regent, I’ll trust you.”

Jorin had taken out a roll of bandages and had begun wrapping the black blade of his sword. “Baldesar Kern, if I may presume.”

Kern inclined his head.

“I can still make a rousing fight if it’s just the two of us, so I can only assume…” Four more silhouettes stepped up to the edge of the ship, outlined in sunlight. “More Champions, yes, as I thought. Well, that’s just clear as a winter spring, isn’t it? I admit I am overmatched.”

“You’ll come with us,” Kern said. It didn’t sound like a question at all.

Jorin tilted his hat back to look at the Champions on deck. “I doubt it. Unless you happen to have some Harrowing wine onboard, which I can’t imagine you do. You’d have to be five hundred years older than you look.”

Kern shifted his helmet to one hand, still not wearing it, and drew a dark, heavy mace with the other. “If you make me use my Vessel, this doesn’t end well for anyone.”

“Particularly not for you, if I grasp the—”

The Champion shot forward, slamming his mace into Jorin’s chest. Or what should have been Jorin’s chest. Instead, the Regent managed to get his half-bandaged sword between him and the weapon. The force still blasted him backwards as though he’d been fired from a catapult, and when he hit the ground, a cloud of black dust and ash billowed up.

Kern slipped his mace back into his belt, watching the cloud rise. “Too dangerous to chase him. Let him run.”

Calder thought the words were meant for him until the Champions on deck saluted and returned. Gingerly, Calder walked forward. The fight had done no favors for his still-healing leg. “Thank you, Guild Head. If not for you, I’d be one more pile of dust.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Kern said, giving him a once-over. “That’s some fine armor you’re wearing.”

“Still, I owe you.”

Kern shook his head. “The debt’s not to you. I was hired.”

A chill seeped back into Calder’s bones. “Hired?”

“Shortly after you spoke with me. A Heartlander man, I imagine a Reader, said he had a good feeling about you. He hired me and as many others from the Guild as we could round up. Paid in goldmarks.”

“He told you to save me?”

“Told me to give you a chance,” Kern said. His face cracked into a small smile. “Said he was confident you’d prove yourself. I didn’t believe him, but I do now.”

Calder didn’t want to ask, but he had to know. “You said he was a Reader. How did you know?”

Kern hung his helmet from a loop on his belt. “Some places, Readers have strange customs. They believe blinding yourself helps you sense Intent more clearly. This man, he seemed like the polite, civilized, educated type, but it looked like he’d blinded himself. He wore a metal blindfold over his eyes.”