Will Wight - Of Dawn and Darkness

In a last, desperate attempt to distract his Intent, he focused his attention through Kelarac’s mark on his arm. The handprint grew warm and his Intent firmed, as though he’d braced himself against a solid foundation. That, finally, was enough. General Teach’s corrosive power scraped at him, trying to find a foothold, but through the mark Calder could hold it at bay.

It was a little alarming that the mark of Kelarac could support his Intent, suggesting that the Great Elder was backing him directly in some way, but he chose not to focus on that. One job at a time.

Now that Tyrfang’s nauseous power had lessened, Calder put his back into the work, swinging his own Awakened blade.

He was pleasantly surprised at how much his addition to the team actually helped. They soon fell into a rhythm: Teach slashed the wall, blackening the flesh for yards around. Then Calder impaled it with his glowing-ember blade, melting it to black sludge. Bliss finished by cleaning up, sweeping the dead matter away with the Spear of Tharlos.

They were through the Elder wall in minutes.

When they stumbled through a sudden hole and onto carpeted floor, it was all Calder could do to focus on catching his breath. He’d assumed there would be…more to it, somehow. They had gone from making slow progress to piercing through so quickly that he could hardly believe it.

He held his gore-caked blade over his head. “Victory!” he shouted, like an idiot. A few of the Guards outside took up a cheer.

“Not quite,” Bliss said. She squinted up the hallway, to a room that looked just like half a dozen others. “There’s someone waiting for us.”

Calder couldn’t sense anything other than Elders through Kelarac’s mark, but he took Bliss’ word for it.

Besides the sunlight spilling in from behind them, the hall was lit by dim organic bulbs hanging down from the ceiling. They cast a dirty, grayish light on their surroundings, like an Elder’s attempt to devour all color.

“Here,” General Teach said, striding up to a door and drawing her sword back, preparing to drive it completely into the room.

She didn’t even try the doorknob, Calder thought, before Teach blasted her way inside. The doors blew inward as though she’d charged in with a sledgehammer.

A ball of green fire met her on the other side.

Teach jerked down and to the right, spinning to put her back against the wall to the right of the doorframe. She held Tyrfang up in both hands. She must have started to lose her grip on its Intent, because dirty white paint began to peel away from her as she knelt there.

Ordinarily, Calder would have felt the corruption of that murderous blade, but at the moment…he realized he was holding his breath again.

Green fire. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. That was a coincidence that strained all credibility; if he’d seen it in a play, he wouldn’t have believed it.

“What we call coincidence is but the work of plans unknown.” The philosopher Hestor’s words struck dangerously close to home. If anything was the result of an Elder’s plan, it would be Jerri’s presence here.

But his wife hadn’t died on that island after all.

Calder moved into the doorway and saw her, in the same red prison clothes she’d been wearing the last time. When he’d abandoned her to her fate. She’d launched a ball of flame even before he’d turned the corner, but he slapped it out of the air contemptuously with the flat of his sword.

That was something he would have never attempted, under other conditions; he didn’t understand the Intent in those green fireballs, nor did he fully understand the power in his own sword. Instead of canceling each other out, the effects could just as easily have fed on one another and burned him alive. Besides, Soulbound blasts of fire were invariably fast . It was a stupid, unnecessary risk to try swatting one in midair.

This time, he hardly noticed. Jerri stood before him, fire gathering unnoticed in her left hand, eyes as wide as he knew his must be.

“Calder, what are you…what are you doing with the Imperial Guard?”

That actually made him smile, though he wasn’t entirely sure he felt like smiling. “I thought you would have guessed. They’re with me. I’m the Emperor now.”

Jerri’s right hand, the one not wreathed in emerald fire, came up to her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears. “You see? He told you the truth!”

Calder’s feelings turned sour. Why had she brought that up? Now he was lost in the memory of slithering eyes on stalks, and the knowledge that he danced in the palm of an Elder’s hand.

Bliss popped out from behind Calder. “Technically, he’s the Imperial Steward. Sitting on the throne until someone, probably him, can be declared the true Emperor. For that, though, we’re going to need the throne.”

Everything seemed to happen at once.

Jerri focused her gaze on Bliss, anger burning through the lens of her unshed tears. Green fire glowed brighter.

The Head of the Blackwatch rolled out, extending the Spear of Tharlos to its full length. The spear of ancient yellowed bone radiated an Intent that swallowed the room, plucking at Calder with invisible fingers and urging him to change. He had to concentrate on Kelarac’s mark, filling his mind with the borrowed authority of the Soul Collector, to face even that much Elder Intent without losing himself.

Armor clanked as General Teach launched herself into the room. Tyrfang’s red-and-black blade rippled with dark power, and Calder found the breath snatched from his lungs. Utter despair rolled over him like a tide, as though he’d come face-to-face with his own executioner.

Whatever happened next, it happened so quickly that he saw it only in flashes.

Jerri released a flash of green fire and dove to the side, while the Spear of Tharlos struck straight at her. It would have missed the fire entirely, except it seemed to twist of its own accord, bending in violation of everything Calder knew about physical mass. It hit the fire straight on…just as Tyrfang’s black edge arrived.

Soon after, when Calder tried to piece the moment together, he couldn’t make it all fit. By rights, Teach should have been five steps farther away than Bliss. They should have been aiming at different points. The fireball should have passed both of them, and they all should have hit only air.

Instead, the power of Jerri’s Vessel met Tyrfang, the Executioner’s Blade and Bliss’ Spear of Tharlos at the same time.

Inches above the flesh-shrouded cage of steel bars that men called the Optasia.

The Intent burned away the Elder flesh surrounding the Emperor’s throne instantly; the heart-like muscle that had kept a grip on the metal dissolved into black powder. The force continued, tearing up floorboards and wall panels, rearranging and shattering furniture.

But the Optasia caught that blend of deadly Intent, accepted it, and sent it out to a thousand relays all around the world.

That was about as much as Calder’s Reader senses caught before they were overwhelmed, and he collapsed on the floor of the Emperor’s bedroom.

After the strange reaction of the Optasia, Bliss ran for the exit. She didn’t prefer to run—running wasn’t dignified—but sometimes the speed was worth it. Especially in cases of grave danger or medical injury.

There had been an injury here, she knew it. And very possibly some grave danger as well. Tharlos’ spear was contorting in the pocket of her coat, twisting and writhing in silent laughter.

When she pushed open the bronze doors leading from the Emperor’s chambers, she remembered that she didn’t know what she was looking for. The courtyard was a scene from an Elderspawn slaughterhouse, with chunks of rotten grayish flesh lying everywhere. Wounded Imperial Guards limped here and there, gathering up the pieces and dumping them into buckets in case the creature pulled itself together again. She could have told them it wasn’t necessary, but she approved of their cleaning efforts. Hygiene was important.