Will Wight - Of Dawn and Darkness

“That depends on one very troubling factor,” Bliss said, staring off into the horizon.

“What’s that?”

“Who’s using it now?”

Jerri’s hand hovered inches away from the throbbing gray-green flesh that walled her inside the room. The bulbous meat that enveloped the walls would have been disgusting, if she hadn’t been trained to look past its appearance and into what it represented : an advance in knowledge and technology so complete that humans might never understand it.

Besides the Elders, who had the power to instantly grow a life—real, living flesh—and bend it to their will? Even the Emperor couldn’t do that. The Elders controlled life and death, memory and knowledge, space and time. The merest fraction of their expertise would improve the lives of people all over the Empire.

Put that way, it was hard to understand why anyone didn’t want to learn from the Elders. Distasteful as they might seem, they embodied the clearest road into the future.

But thoughts of the distant future would only distract her for so long when she was more concerned with today.

“How long must I wait?” Jerri asked.

The room’s only other occupant, a dark-skinned Heartlander man who might have been a native of the Capital, sat on the corner of the Emperor’s bed. A softly glowing bulb, dangling from the new-grown flesh overhead, cast shadows on his face. Jewels gleamed at his neck, on his fingers, in his ears, in his hair—it seemed that he had crammed gold and gems anywhere he could fit them. Only his eyes were plain and unadorned, covered as they were by a steel blindfold that seemed to have been bolted to his face.

She’d seen other Elder cults who believed in mutilating their bodies, demonstrating their dedication to the Great Ones, but no one else had gone so far as to blind themselves. Especially not to these gruesome extremes. It looked as though he’d driven steel screws straight into his own eyes.

But he smiled broadly at her question. “If you wish to learn from the Elders, patience is the first and most valuable skill. There are beings who will not begin a conversation without observing the other party for at least a year, and whose names take a man’s lifetime to properly pronounce.”

This was another characteristic of the absurdly devout: they always pretended to know more than they did. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“To understand the answer, you must first understand the question.”

Fury flowed into her from the Vessel on her ear, and both earrings lit up. One shone with the power of unreleased flame, and the other restricted that power, protecting her from its corrosion. To some degree.

Green fire played around her fingers, and she examined her fingertips as though searching for the proper words. “I owe a debt to the Great One who freed me from captivity, not to you. I owe you nothing. I do not know you, nor do I know what I’m doing here, and until I do I’m afraid I can’t cooperate. If it is your job to guide me, as you claim, then I suggest you start doing so. Otherwise…well, I am a Soulbound. And you’re not.”

That was an assumption on her part, but a good one. She wasn’t a Reader, so she couldn’t sense if one of the man’s rings or necklaces might secretly be his Soulbound Vessel, but she doubted it. The Sleepless had only one true combat-capable Soulbound in their membership, and the cabal valued her highly because of it. He may have been a mercenary Soulbound hired by the cult for this one task, but then he wouldn’t have been so secretive about the nature of that task. Besides, only a true fanatical believer would blind himself.

The man stroked his thin beard like a sage in thought. “By definition, I cannot be a Soulbound. One requires something to bind, after all.”

Before Jerri could think too hard about that statement, the room shook. The flesh of the walls quivered, and the living light flickered. “That one was closer,” she said.

“Closer,” her companion agreed, “but they are not yet striking at the heart. It’s merely a flesh wound, as they say.” He smiled to himself, revealing two teeth capped in gold.

It had been perhaps three days since Jerri had been stuck in this room, though it was hard to tell the exact time without access to natural light. She remained surrounded by skin and muscle as though she’d been swallowed by a great Elder whale, food oozing through disgusting openings at regular intervals. Her transmission through the void had taken her directly here, and she’d waited in the dimness for instructions. In vain, so far.

Yesterday, the blind man had appeared next to her, presumably through a void transmission similar to her own.

It was he who explained exactly where they were: the center of the Imperial Palace, inside the Emperor’s personal rooms.

That knowledge had distracted Jerri for hours, as she explored the suite of flesh-covered rooms in a new light. This was the bed where the Emperor had slept. Those paintings were favored by the Emperor. The decorative swords on the wall, if they had ever been used by the Emperor in self-defense, would count as some of the greatest weapons in history. She wished Calder was here, so that he could appreciate the rich stores of Intent that no doubt lingered in this room.

As always when she thought of Calder, pain and sickness and anger rolled through her. She had handled him badly, she knew. Almost as badly as she ever could have. The assassin Shera had shown up at the worst possible time, before any of her plans had borne fruit. When Jerri finally saw Calder again, she had been forced to act out her duty as a member of the Sleepless. She could hardly have made a worse impression.

But still, he had abandoned her in a cell. Her own husband . It hurt.

Make him listen, her Vessel demanded, indistinguishable from her own thoughts. He cannot stop you.

To distract herself, to keep her from another fight with her own Soulbound Vessel, she turned her attention to the one object in the room she didn’t understand. Behind a shattered section of wall, inside what must once have been a hidden closet, there was a knot of gray-green flesh the size of her entire body. More than anything, it reminded her of the Heart of Nakothi, as though the Heart itself had grown a hundredfold and swallowed something inside.

Between the folds of its flesh, she caught a glimpse of silvery bars and wires. Like an intricate cage of polished steel, packed into Elder flesh.

She’d examined it for two whole days with no result, and had only barely resisted the temptation to burn it away with her Soulbound power. But she’d forgotten to ask her new, unhelpful guide about it. Until now.

Jerri pointed to the mass of metal and meat. “Is this what they’re after?”

Her companion turned to her, studying her through sightless eyes. “So even blind humans can find the truth if they root around long enough.”

She gripped fistfuls of her red pants to keep her irritation in check. No one had ever nettled her quite so thoroughly as her blindfolded guide; even with a Vessel that provoked her to rage, she had maintained an agreeable disposition for years. She thought of herself as quite a gentle person, though she longed to blast this man to smoking pieces. “You would be the expert on blindness, I suppose.”

“Indeed, thank you for noticing,” he said gravely. “I can tell Readers apart from the blind, though most cannot. It’s a skill I spent much of my life perfecting.”

As with most everything he’d said, that statement tied her brain in knots. He could tell the difference between Readers and ordinary people? How? Calder was one of the more skilled Readers she’d ever known, and even he couldn’t do that. Perhaps only the Emperor could.