So when the wave of shadow struck him, slamming up against his Intent fortified by Kelarac’s mark, Calder expected to survive. He didn’t expect to push through it so easily. It felt like pushing against a freezing wind blowing off of a graveyard, stinking and repulsive; it wasn’t pleasant, but it certainly wasn’t difficult. Resisting Tyrfang’s aura had been much harder back in the Imperial Palace, and judging by the way Teach had been repeatedly pushed back, Jorin’s weapon couldn’t be weaker.
Calder opened himself up to Read the atmosphere around him, and instantly understood. The Emperor’s white armor. He was wrapped in protective Intent so ancient and solid that it defended even his essence, letting him march forward even under Jorin’s attack.
That worked, he realized, with no small measure of disbelief. Now, can I take a direct hit? He decided not to test that.
Jorin still wasn’t watching him as he jogged closer, evidently having dismissed him with the single attack. Calder’s heart pounded. He only had to distract the Regent, to occupy him long enough to give Teach a chance to kill him.
Calder was close enough to begin his strike, stepping forward to drive his Awakened cutlass into Jorin’s side, before the Regent saw him. Jorin’s head jerked back in disbelief, and he barely managed to avoid a cut from Teach as he back-stepped away from Calder.
Together, Calder and the Guild Head forced Jorin onto the defensive. It wasn’t pleasant, fighting within both corrosive auras—it was like forcing his way through a lake of raw sewage—but it was bearable. Between his own sword, Kelarac’s mark, and the Emperor’s armor, he could stand among two of the greatest fighters in Imperial history.
For about five seconds, Calder had never felt more powerful.
Then Jorin blasted him with Intent, another gust of freezing wind, staggering him in his tracks. The Regent followed up with a slash to Calder’s face, making him jerk his cutlass up, but it was a feint. Jorin reversed the strike to land on Teach.
And it did land. Teach had thrown herself out of position to protect Calder, only to take the cut on her armored left arm.
The sound of the strike was a satisfying clang of metal-on-metal, and for a second Calder believed that her armor had saved her. Then he saw the dark scratch on its surface and heard her agonized scream.
He had to shoulder-tackle her out of the way to protect her from Jorin’s follow-up. She never lost her grip on Tyrfang, even as she tumbled to the ground and rolled away.
“You’re the seedling Emperor, then,” Jorin said, panting. “Let’s have you go a round or two.”
Calder attacked first. As Loreli, another Regent, had once put it: “In a duel, the defender is losing.” Jorin swept his black blade in a lazy arc, as though he meant to slice the orange-spotted cutlass in half.
When Calder turned the hit, Jorin’s eyebrows climbed up into his hat. “Here now, where’d you get that sword?”
Instead of responding, Calder attacked the man from the left, opening up some space, trying to force him away from Teach’s body. If he gave her some time, she might recover, though her low, pained moans didn’t give him much hope.
The Regent tolerated that for a few exchanges, then he lost patience. He reversed the sword in both hands, driving his blade into the ground.
All around Calder, the earth blasted away into loose black grit. He lost his footing, tumbling to the ground, shielding his mouth and eyes with his arm. Even when the air cleared he couldn’t find purchase, coughing in the rising dust-cloud, trying to clear the dirt from his eyes.
Jorin walked up, a hazy figure, calm and unhurried. “If you survive, we’ll have a chat about your sword. But I don’t mean to pressure you. Life is such a brief candle.” He raised his blade.
And, as Calder had experienced several times before, he was suddenly somewhere else. The world shifted around him, as quick as a vanishing stage curtain.
Now, he stood on a floor of polished white marble, and he was feeling remarkably better: he was warm, and clean, and not at all covered in blackened grit. He stood in a shrine of some kind, though where there would usually be a statue of the Emperor was instead a towering marble figure of some kind of warped fish-creature. There were no walls, only rows of columns looking out onto the sea.
The sea stretched all around him. This shrine must have been on some tiny island on the Aion, because he didn’t see any other land, only black storm-tossed waves. The wind outside was wicked, stirring up wild surf, as black clouds danced and lightning lit the night.
Other than the lightning, the scene was illuminated only by a smoky torch dimly flickering over the statue’s head. Calder felt that he should have been freezing, but somehow the wind stayed a perfectly comfortable temperature.
“I once intended to have this built,” Kelarac said. “It’s in the center of what you now call the Aion Sea.” He stood looking up at the statue, just as Calder remembered him: a fashionable Heartlander, his thin beard neatly trimmed, clothes just as the Emperor would have worn them, rings on every finger and waves of jewels on his neck. A few of his teeth gleamed gold as he smiled, and his most prominent feature—the polished band of steel over his eyes—reflected the strikes of lightning.
“Why didn’t you?” Calder asked politely. He was still trying to be considerate, out of respect for a massively powerful being, but in truth his frustration had grown. Kelarac was behind Jerri’s actions somehow, but he still pretended to be Calder’s friend.
“Timing. It’s all about the proper place, isn’t it? The right time, the precise location. Temporal or spatial, if the place is off even slightly, then it might as well have never existed at all…”
Calder let the Great Elder muse privately. In their previous meetings, he had never waxed philosophical, instead sticking close to business. It could mean he was ready to give Calder a gift, or to eat him alive.
“You didn’t destroy the Optasia,” Kelarac noted.
“Yet.”
“You believe it would destroy you.”
“Would it?” Not that Calder would take the word of the Soul Collector, but a straight answer would be nice.
Kelarac’s golden teeth flashed. “That depends on a number of shifting factors. Place, as I said. However, I can assure you that even though the throne might be unsuitable, the rest of the network is very much intact. I can find a use for it.”
“Of that, sir, I have no doubt.” Calder made the words sound respectful instead of wry.
“In exchange for your word that you will deliver the Optasia to me, I can deliver some immediate help. Allies that can save you from your current situation.”
Calder’s mind flashed to the strange Navigator ship, the one decorated in gold. “Those were your people waiting outside the Gray Island?”
Kelarac folded ringed fingers together. “They’re nearby.”
“And they can actually save me from the Regent?”
“Oh yes.”
Calder had been trying to stretch the time as much as possible, but he only had one answer. “I’m sorry. I can’t.” The price was too high.
Delivering the Heart of Nakothi was one thing; he’d given a piece of one Elder to another. If Kelarac had been willing to dig a little, he could have excavated a heart on his own. But as far as Calder was concerned, that had been an equitable trade…and even now, it didn’t weigh easily on him. He often wondered what horrors Kelarac could perpetrate with a piece of the Dead Mother’s power.
But instead of flying into a rage, as Calder had half expected, Kelarac nodded. “Too high a price. I think you estimate the value of the Emperor’s device too favorably. Soon, it may not be worth the metal from which it was cast. But I wouldn’t be much of a collector if I didn’t know how to haggle, would I?”