Calder couldn’t help thinking back to three years ago. The last time he’d seen the former Champion, the man had a smile that could blind an eagle at a thousand paces. Now, there were two black gaps where teeth had been knocked out in fights. The man showed more scars than armor, and several deep wounds showed that he’d have new scars when he next entered the arena.
If Calder had been faster, perhaps he could have helped Urzaia leave whole. Three years was already too long, and he would have to wait even longer.
The crier shouted something that was swallowed up by the shouts of the crowd, and then walked onstage himself. He gestured to Urzaia, who flicked the Houndmaster’s corpse off the end of his hatchet and followed, still smiling and waving to the crowd.
Led by the arena crier, Urzaia walked out of the sand and below…only to emerge a minute later in the arena seats. Right by Calder.
The fighter was so close that Calder could smell the blood on him. He tipped his hat lower, trying to squeeze back into the crowd—he couldn’t take it if he saw a look of hope on Urzaia’s face, hope that Calder would have to disappoint.
But the spectators weren’t content to let Calder leave. This close to the Champion gladiator, they screamed and pushed forward, shoving Calder up to the rough edge of the stone platform. Only by bracing his boot against the wall and flailing his pistol around did he earn a pocket of air, and by the time he looked back up, the crier and the Champion were standing above him.
On the platform.
The crier’s first statement was lost in the crowd, but his second was just barely audible: “…almost five hundred lives taken in the arena, with no signs of giving up!”
“None can make me surrender!” Urzaia shouted, raising his fists. His hatchets were missing, Calder noted—he must have given them up before he was allowed to get within reach of the paying spectators.
The crier waited for the furious cheers to die before he continued. “Are you here for glory, Woodsman? Or do you live to take lives?”
Urzaia laughed, a booming laugh that Calder was sure would have filled the arena even without invested Intent. “A man once promised to return my freedom,” he said. Calder felt as though his bones had turned to ice. “I must live so I can collect on that promise. And while I wait, I might as well have a little fun!”
The audience screamed, even as Calder forced his way through them and back to Jerri.
Urzaia would have to wait a while longer. There was nothing he could do about that. But the next time Calder visited this arena, he wouldn’t leave alone.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Someone’s in there,” Calder said.
No one wasted his time with questions or complaints. Andel looked at Foster, who shrugged and pulled open the door to the Emperor’s quarters.
A goat-legged Imperial Guard lay sprawled on the carpet inside, papers strewn all about him where he’d dropped them. He’d been conscious only a minute before, and there was little chance he’d taken that instant to pass out on his own. Someone else was inside.
Nothing beats the satisfaction of being right. Together, Calder and Andel rushed in quietly, hauling the Imperial Guard out the door and back into the courtyard. The blond captain looked likely to shout, so Calder shook his head.
According to Calder’s silent, frantic signals, his crew shut the doors.
“What’s the security like in this building?” Calder whispered.
“It’s usually a death-trap for anyone inside,” the Guard captain responded, her eyes locked on the door. “But it’s been uninhabited for years. I need men.”
“Go get them. Capture, not kill. And send someone to inform Teach.”
She saluted and ran off, shouting before she was quite out of earshot.
“Who do you think it is, sir?” Andel asked, folding his arms and watching the door.
“Consultants,” Calder said. Someone had already hired a Champion to take a crack at him. Why not a real assassin? “They killed Maxeus a couple of days ago, and now they’re working up the ladder.”
Foster drew a weapon, holding it low in both hands. “You’re not real humble, are you?”
“‘Humility is the death-knell of the soul,’” Calder quoted. “Enterius, I think.”
“Loreli had some views of her own on the matter,” Andel said. He didn’t sound particularly alarmed by the idea of a Consultant waiting for them in the Emperor’s chambers. “‘Humility is the perfection that we should always seek, but can never truly achieve.’”
“You were a Luminian; obviously you’d take her side.”
“I wasn’t aware you’d been in a dispute with the Regent, sir.”
That actually raised an interesting point. He’d always thought of Loreli as a strategist and scholar from the ancient past, not a contemporary. But she hadn’t ever died, not really, and she was currently awake and serving the Empire as a Regent.
She didn’t want another Emperor. What did that say about—
His unproductive train of thought was broken by the Guard captain’s return. “They’re taking up position,” she said. “I suggest we remove you to a safe location.”
“Thank you, Captain, but I decline.” Calder pulled off his hat and swept her a bow. “I’m wearing my own clothes today, I’m hanging out with my own friends—”
Foster coughed pointedly.
“—my own colleagues, and I’ll handle this the way I usually would.”
“Foolishly, but directly,” Andel said.
“I would have said ‘bravely.’”
“I’m sure you would have, sir.”
Honestly, Calder was in a better mood than he’d been in for…weeks, probably. His wounds were starting to improve, though they were also starting to itch, he was finally feeling at home in the Imperial Palace, he thought he was making headway in his identity as Imperial Steward, and for the first time he was faced with an assassin that he’d outwitted and overmatched from the very beginning.
“I have to insist,” the Guard captain was saying. “We have no idea who the enemy is, what he wants, or what he can—”
She was interrupted by the deafening shriek of tearing metal, which filled the courtyard as one of the Emperor’s bronze doors crumpled like a used handkerchief.
Calder was still trying to figure out how to react to the sight of a balled-up door when it began to roll, with ponderous force and surprising speed, away from its housing and straight toward him.
He dove to the side as Andel and Foster did likewise, the three of them separated by a loose ball of bronze. Something exploded—a gunshot, he realized, close to his ear—and then a dark-skinned man in the black of a Consultant Gardener was slashing a bronze knife toward his waist.
Calder staggered back, grasping at his sword, but he knew he wouldn’t make it. The assassin was too close, too fast, his approach too unexpected.
Andel moved first.
He slammed into the Gardener with a running shoulder-tackle that sent the man rolling over the tiles, bronze blades clattering away from his hands.
Calder looked at Andel with relief and more than a little astonishment. “You saved me, Andel.”
The quartermaster was still on his knees, unbalanced after the tackle, but his eyes were on the Consultant. “Not quite yet, sir.”
Both of the Gardener’s hands came up, and a pair of tiny silver knives flashed out. One flew toward Andel, one toward Calder.
This time, Calder was ready.
His Awakened cutlass was in his hand, blade glowing with irregular orange spots like the pattern on a live coal. He slapped the throwing knife from the air, though the sudden motion pulled on his wounded shoulder. At least he hadn’t put too much weight on his injured leg; if it collapsed on him again, that would be the opening the Consultant needed.