Teach made a choking sound back by the carriage, and Calder felt like the man had punched him in the gut. The Champions were the second oldest Imperial Guild, behind the Consultants. Half the stories of Imperial unification began or ended with the legendary powers of the Champions. If there was no Champion’s Guild, then how could Calder pretend there was still an Empire?
“What happened?” Calder managed to ask, even though he felt like a child faced with the death of a hero.
Kern sighed. “The Emperor died. Without him, there was no one to tell us what to fight for. Or what not to fight for. Champions started to take contracts at their own discretion, all over the world, until eventually most of them stopped reporting to me altogether. I only know one way to make people do what I want them to, and sometimes force doesn’t work. Sometimes the tide goes out, and you can’t stop it.”
A snap cracked the air, and for a second Calder thought he’d heard a gunshot. But it was the half-painted fencepost, broken in two under Kern’s brush. The bristles had actually stiffened somehow, temporarily frozen like they’d been made of steel, and a casual push of Kern’s hand had snapped the thick plank of wood in half.
His shoulders drooped, and he tore both halves of the broken fencepost away. Casually he hurled them over his house, where they landed with the clatter of wood on wood. As though these two pieces had landed on a pile of many others.
Kern walked over to the porch, where a stack of spare boards waited. “This always takes twice as long as it should, but it’s my own fault. Accidentally threw a stove through the fence in the first place.”
There was nothing else Calder could get from him, so he might as well leave. His first meeting with a legend had gone much worse than he’d hoped. “It may be futile, Guild Head, but I have to try one last time. Will you support us?”
“The only Champion I can speak for is myself,” Kern said. He picked up the board with one hand and a hammer with the other. “As for me, I don’t trust you enough to risk my life for you. That’s nothing to take offense about. You haven’t proven yourself yet. And I will be risking my life, if you’re asking me to go up against Regents and Gardeners.” He propped the plank carefully in place, lining up a nail. “That’s about all there is to say on the matter. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m trying not to break this one.”
Calder left Baldesar Kern gently hammering his broken fence back together.
Back in the Imperial Palace, Calder dropped Andel off at his rooms. He’d intended to return to his own, but Teach stopped him.
“Without the Champions, this battle becomes even more dangerous,” she said.
As though Calder needed another reminder of his failure. “If you think you can persuade him, please do.”
“He won’t change his mind for me. Nor for anyone else we know, I think. You went to see him in person, and that shows respect. In a year or two we’ll try again.”
“In the first month of his reign as Imperial Steward, Calder Marten oversaw the dissolution of the Champion’s Guild and led an attack on the Consultants,” Calder said bitterly. “He was driven insane shortly thereafter by the throne he inherited from the Emperor.”
Teach tapped him in the chest with the back of her fist. She didn’t seem to put much power into it, but he gasped for breath and staggered backward two paces. His wounds forcibly reminded him that they still ached. “Self-pity is a bad habit, and you should lose it as soon as possible. The attack on the Gray Island is going forward, so as I see it, you have two options. You can support us with the Optasia, which is by far the better choice, except that we can’t prepare you to use it safely. Otherwise, you can accompany us.”
Calder set his emotions aside, focusing on the conversation. “I’ve already made my decision clear. You need me.”
Teach worked her jaw as though chewing on something. Finally, she said, “For that, I can prepare you.”
Then she led him on an exhausting path through the Imperial Palace. Calder had always known the complex was huge, but seeing it on the map didn’t have nearly the same impact. As they walked deeper and deeper, mile after mile, Calder’s wounded leg started to throb. Even his healthy leg ached, and he wondered how Teach could even stand walking this distance in her armor.
All the while, they never left the palace grounds. It was like a city unto itself, and Calder was seeing its underbelly for the first time. I’ll be spending the rest of my life here, he realized, and it was a strange thought. He’d grown up in the Capital, but the Imperial Palace was a totally separate world.
Each time Teach passed a group of Imperial Guards, they offered to join her, but one and all she turned them down and instructed them to forget her passage. “You did not see us,” she said, more than a dozen times.
She’s going to kill me and hide the body. When the thought first came to him, it was a joke, but as more time passed he wondered. Maybe she actually intended to lock him away until the battle was over; that could be what she meant by “preparing” him.
At last they came to a stone building the size of an outhouse. It was completely out of style for the rest of the Imperial Palace, sticking out like a gravestone in the middle of a kitchen. The tiny building was little more than a rectangle of rough stone and a steel door, which was guarded by two Imperial Guards. They both had mouths filled with the pointed teeth of crocodiles, as well as absurdly muscled arms and six-fingered hands. They could have been brothers.
For Teach, they stepped aside, though they eyed Calder suspiciously.
“I haven’t opened this door in more than five years,” Teach said, taking a heavy steel key from a cord around her neck. “What you’re about to see is highly privileged, and there are fewer people allowed in here than in the Imperial treasury.”
Calder’s expectations rose with each word. Now, if there were anything less than a dragon on a hoard of gold inside, he would be disappointed. “What is it?”
“The Emperor’s personal armory.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
With Petal aboard The Testament, all of Calder’s plans for freeing Urzaia advanced easily. Almost too easily. He distrusted any plan that wasn’t full of danger and fraught with unnecessary risk.
She manufactured explosives so quickly and cheaply that Foster had become suspicious. He knew something about alchemy from somewhere in that past he refused to discuss, and he complained loudly that there was no way she could put together a functional charge without…a list of ingredients that Calder never bothered to remember.
So they’d tested one. Each of Petal’s charges was a rectangular wooden container the size of a cigar box. In fact, they were cigar boxes, filled with alchemical solutions in several independent chambers and sealed with resin. Andel lit the fuse and launched the charge with the force of his arm, aiming at the whale-sized shadow that had been following them for days. The creature occasionally poked an eye-stalk out of the water to take a look at them, and Calder had gotten sick of it. He’d originally planned to let the Lyathatan deal with it.
When the charge flew straight for the underwater shadow and detonated, sending a plume of water up like a missed cannon-shot, Calder knew he wouldn’t have to bother his pet Elderspawn. And the charges worked.
After that, Foster went from calling Petal a “waste of bilge-space” to “genius.”