Ah, yes. Captain was a rank. That could get confusing, with Navigator captains and military captains all mixing together. If any captains of industry showed up, they’d have to start calling each other by name.
Calder lowered his hand, hoping no one noticed, and complied with the captain’s order by retreating. Technically he wasn’t a member of the Guard or the Head of a Guild, but he had every right to be here. He projected that confidence into his stance in the hopes that the Guards would overlook him. If he was dragged off like a willful child and he had to resist, that could be…awkward. If he knew one thing about governance, he knew that it was unwise to start a hostile relationship with one’s own guards.
When everyone had backed away, Teach drew her sword. Nothing dramatic, nothing ostentatious, simply a woman pulling a weapon from its sheath.
The dramatic part came immediately afterward.
Light itself suffered as the blade seemed to wash everything in shadow. Calder’s vision grew slightly fuzzy, as if everything shook, but the world felt deathly still. It was only to his eyes that even the stone of the courtyard buzzed in place. And to his Reader’s senses…
Death, decay, execution, blood, carnage, war…
He pulled his mind back. Even the shallowest Reading revealed Tyrfang’s deadly history, and if he looked any deeper, he wouldn’t be able to focus on anything else. Instead, he focused on the appearance of the blade itself: rough black metal with veins of bright red crawling down the flat. As though the metal had absorbed some fraction of the blood it spilled.
Teach flicked the weapon at the Elder flesh surrounding the walls, drawing a thin black line the length of Calder’s hand.
When Calder had fought the Children of the Dead Mother, Kelarac had given him an Awakened blade to use against Elderspawn. It had worked even better than Calder had ever expected; with a single cut, it reduced lesser Elders to nothing more than black sludge.
Tyrfang had a similar effect on this Elder fortification…but on a much greater scale.
No sooner had the black scratch appeared on the skin than the entire outer layer of the building blackened and sloughed off, filling the courtyard with piles of dead and rotten flesh. Foul liquid splattered everywhere, bringing with it a stench like corpses dissolved in acid.
Calder’s shoes were splashed with black goo, and he kept his expression composed, as suited an Emperor. He would have all his clothes burned before dawn.
More of the structure was exposed now, surrounded by pieces of raw, pinkish flesh. Teach had drawn back her sword for another blow, stepping forward to drive the sword in, but an agonized shriek held her back.
It seemed to come from all around, from every bit of meat still living in the confines of the courtyard. A second later, the flesh attacked.
Ropes of muscle whipped out from the windows and the door, slapping at Teach. At the same time, smoking liquid sprayed from a bulb on the second floor, aimed to land on the General’s head.
She slapped away one tendril with the flat of her weapon, blackening and killing it instantly, and backhanded another with her gauntlet. Teach sidestepped the fluid without looking up, taking a few casual steps back until the Elder thing couldn’t reach her anymore.
When she was far enough away, the tentacles retracted, and the flesh ballooned out even faster than it had grown before.
“Bliss?” Teach asked, without turning around.
The Head of the Blackwatch leaned forward, squinting at the creature. “Hmmmm…I will examine it tonight. By morning, I’ll know what to do.”
“Very good.” Teach turned to the Guard captain. “Rotating shifts, just as you had before. Don’t let it grow any further before the Blackwatch are finished with their tests.”
The orange-eyed captain saluted. “Ma’am.”
As for the rest of them, that left the delightful proposition of finding rooms in a palace they knew was haunted by Elders. It was one thing to face Elder influence on the Aion, when you had your ship around you and your crew close at hand, but it was entirely worse to try and sleep in a bedroom where the building itself could be your enemy.
It will be clear in the morning, Calder told himself. Bliss would know what to do, and he could get on with being Emperor. It was strange; he was close to sitting on the throne, closer than he’d ever been since he’d first considered the possibility, but it had never seemed farther away. It was as though the Elders and the Fates were conspiring to throw every obstacle they could in his way.
He burned his clothes in a bonfire outside a palace window.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Calder and Jerri sat on boxes, huddled over a table in The Testament’s cabin. The room was so cramped it felt like a closet, and Calder sometimes found himself breathing too quickly, as though he were going to run out of air. The table was strewn with navigational charts, notes, and half-scribbled maps that Andel had provided.
For the last six weeks of their journey, Andel had plotted their course, and was even taking most of the burden of steering the ship. Calder helped with his Soulbound powers as best he could, but it was like trying to play the violin after having watched a genius musician. It seemed simple and intuitive, until you tried it. Calder felt that he should have been able to furl and unfurl the ship’s sails with nothing more than a thought, but in practice, the green-veined stretch of skin had simply wrapped itself around the mast and refused to be dislodged. The two Champions had been forced to leap up to the crow’s nest and untangle the sheet by hand.
Impressive, yes, but inconvenient.
Calder sensed The Testament like a second, simpler mind tucked away inside his own. It had a purpose, and it yearned to fulfill that purpose: to guide and protect them as they sailed the Aion. Somehow, it felt so eager that it almost fought Calder for control. He had never heard of a Soulbound Vessel wrestling its owner, but he had to admit that what he knew about Soulbound was largely academic. There was a stark difference between reading about Vessels and having one in his head.
His alliance with the ship may have started out uneasy, but they needed to smooth out that relationship if they wanted to survive the eldritch dangers of the Aion Sea.
Which brought them to the charts and maps on the table. They were a month into this journey, and Andel had guided them the entire way. At this rate, Calder would be relegated to a passenger on his own ship. He refused to let that happen, and Jerri seemed to agree with him.
If they were ever going to escape from the shadow of the Imperial officer, they had to chart their own course. Literally.
Jerri flipped her braid over her shoulder, running a finger along the map, tracing coordinates that Calder had provided. “And that would leave us…locked in ice, just south of the Fioran Reaches.”
Calder frowned down at his own piece of paper, covered in calculations. At the moment, they looked like meaningless scribbles. “That’s not right. If anything, it should abandon us on a stretch of shoreline outside the Izyrian jungle.”
Jerri shrugged. “Looking at the tides, I thought it would come out somewhere in Erin. Maybe we’re not moving as fast as we thought.”
The ship pitched lightly to one side, and an inkwell slid away in a suicidal dive. Calder snatched it from the brink, leaving only a few drops of ink to splatter next to his shoes.
Jerri gripped the table with both hands, face a shade paler than usual. It had taken her a week or two to adjust to the movement of the ship, and she still wasn’t fully accustomed to the constant rolling of the surf.