Will Wight - Of Dawn and Darkness

At first, she saw nothing wrong, and her heart sank even further. If she couldn’t see the damage, that meant the Optasia’s network had carried it somewhere else in the world. She might never discover what the Elders had done until it was too late.

One Guard, a woman with a tail like a peacock, was staring up at the clouds. Her bucket fell from a limp hand, spilling Elderspawn gore onto the ground.

This was what a mystery novel might call a clue. Bliss followed the woman’s gaze up, expecting a six-winged Elder with a mouth like a shark’s.

Instead, the sky itself was distorted. A long, winding stripe of twisted wrongness , like a river of heat haze or a transparent worm. The air fuzzed and twisted, high overhead, and Bliss almost thought she could hear a distant crackle.

She’d seen corruption like this before. This would only be visible from a certain angle; even as high as it was, no one outside the palace would notice anything wrong. And it would get much worse, very soon.

The sky was going to break.

When Calder came to, he had a moment of panic. The world was frozen around him, too still and too quiet. Something was wrong.

He tried to roll off his bed and grab the pistol that he knew would be next to him, but his wounds screamed in protest. His head pounded so badly that his vision actually dimmed for a second, and he was forced to lean back against his pillow.

Reader’s burn, he realized, and as soon as he accepted the truth, reality came flooding back. There was nothing wrong—he was onshore. Aboard The Testament, the motion of the boat never stopped, and there was no such thing as silence.

He relaxed and let the pain fade away. Normally, if he’d rolled around like this, he would have woken Jerri immediately. She would be the one to reassure him, to make fun of him for worrying when everything was peaceful.

But she wasn’t here. She would be locked in some secure corner of the palace by now.

So something was wrong after all, just nothing new.

Thoughts of Jerri shook up his memory, reminding him of the afternoon, and he once again tried to sit up. Again, pain convinced him to stay where he was.

What had happened? The Optasia had reacted strangely to the attack…an attack that shouldn’t have landed in the first place. And why was Jerri there, in the Emperor’s chambers, sealed in by an Elder wall that had been there since before she left the Gray Island?

None of that made any sense, so there was only one possibility. An Elder was pulling strings, shaping events directly instead of letting them fall out as they naturally would. Why? He had no idea, and his head hurt too badly for further speculation.

Soft light from a distant quicklamp filtered in around the edges of his window, so it must have been the dead of night. He surrendered himself to the pain, hoping sleep would take him quickly.

Just before he shut his eyes again, the window creaked open, and a man hopped in. He wore his hair long, and in one hand, he carried a dagger in a reverse grip. Fresh blood dripped from the weapon’s tip.

Calder was so shocked that, for a moment, he refused to believe what he was seeing. Not that it was so unusual for someone to try and kill him—that was happening more and more, these days—but that the would-be assassin had come exactly when he woke up.

What were the odds? Seconds earlier or later, and he would have seen nothing. Heard nothing. This man would have cut him in half.

Calder gave up questioning his good fortune as his fight instincts kicked in. The killer turned to him, striding confidently over to the bed, flipping his knife in one hand. As he got closer, Calder realized he was humming a jaunty tune.

I have one shot, Calder thought. He didn’t have time to waste struggling out of bed or fighting against his pain; he had to reach his weapon, and he had to do it in one movement. That was his only chance of survival.

When he’d gathered enough strength, he clenched his jaw against the pain and rolled off the bed.

His assailant caught him and tossed him back. “Whoops, there you go. Up up up.”

The man didn’t seem at all surprised or thrown off by Calder’s escape attempt; in fact, he seemed not to care at all. He pressed lightly on Calder’s chest with one hand, but no matter how Calder struggled, he couldn’t raise his chest an inch. He tried to gather the breath for a scream, but the attacker pushed the air from his lungs. The attacker winked at him and raised the knife.

And a shadow slit his throat with a bronze blade.

Calder had never realized it before, having never seen an assassination from quite this close, but slicing a man’s throat open took quite a bit of strength. The shadow ripped through his neck like a butcher slicing meat, and warm blood showered Calder’s face. And most of the rest of his body too, he supposed. Not that he was in any condition to complain.

He scraped the blood from his eyes, ignoring the pain from his injuries and the insistent hammer-blows of his headache, desperate to see.

When his eyes cleared, he was in for a surprise: the man was still on his feet. His throat was split almost to the spine, but he held it together with one hand. The other smashed back against the black-clad figure behind him.

The killer with the bronze blade flew backward with the force of a cannonball, smashing a crater-sized dent into the wall and falling limply to the floor. Frowning as though the whole mess irritated him, the man with the slit throat collapsed a moment later.

Leaving a blood-soaked Calder alone in his bedroom with two corpses.

“What just happened?” His voice came out in a croak, and of course no one answered him. Gingerly, favoring his newly stressed wounds, he reached out for his cutlass. Whoever had brought him here was also considerate enough to leave his weapon within reach, so he was able to tug the hilt out of its sheath without much trouble.

A second later, he poked at his attacker’s body with the tip of his sword. No movement. Surely he should be dead, given the amount of blood he’d lost, but Calder would have never expected him to continue standing with his head halfway severed. No point in taking chances.

Calder poked him again, harder this time, and almost shrieked as the other body groaned and lifted a hand to its head.

Not just one person who survived a blow that should have killed them, but two. He should take up gambling; clearly the laws of probability were meaningless around him.

The shadow pulled off the black cloth that had surrounded its head, revealing a mess of blond hair. Meia looked up at him, orange eyes flashing with reflected light. “Champions,” she said, with a grimace of distaste. “I’m sorry. I should have been more thorough.”

“I would have thought a slit throat was thorough enough.” A Champion. His body chilled as he realized how close he’d come to death. If Meia hadn’t been there…if it had been someone other than Meia, the Consultant who could fight Urzaia…

This was far too many coincidences for one day.

Meia hauled herself to her feet. “I’ve never met anyone that could survive that. But let’s be sure, shall we?” She crept over to the man’s body, pulling needles from her pouch.

A poisoned needle went into both thighs and both wrists before she sliced the tendons on the back of each ankle. Calder prided himself on a strong stomach, but he looked away. He’d seen enough for one night.

When she was done, she walked over to the door and opened it a crack, peering out. “The hallway is unguarded. That’s a pity. He killed eight Guards, two Watchmen, and one Magister that I’m aware of.”