CHAPTER 59: PROMISED HORIZONS

  “I don’t want to fight you,” Elias told him.

  “I don’t want to fight you either, but I have a duty to my people,” Orin replied. “Rogue collectors are a danger to the world. Come without a fuss, and we can be forgiving. If you’re what I think you are”—he nodded toward the ring—“if you have the sight, you will be valued among the Valshynar.”

  “I have a life, a business, friends.”

  “You’ll make new ones.”

  Elias shook his head. “No one will ever know we had this conversation unless you tell them. Just leave it at that.”

  “I cannot,” Orin declared.

  “Well, you can’t stop me either.”

  Elias turned around and started walking, hoping for the best, hoping for reason to reign supreme. As Orin had said, he was valuable to the Valshynar. The guy was not going to simply stab him in the back.

  What he did do, however, was grab Elias’s shoulder, squeezing it tight enough to halt the latter man’s departure. A saber’s blade appeared in Elias’s vision, floating in the air not far from his throat.

  “I have a small ship parked at the docks,” Orin explained. “We’re headed there. Know that I will use force if necessary, and know that I am strong, very strong.”

  To a layman, those words might have sounded like a simple boast, but Elias recalled the Five Great Schools that predated Valshynarian sovereignty and that each once favored collectors of a particular aptitude. The Serpent Moon School had valued the gift of sight, the Valshynar School intelligence, the Silver Sanctum School speed, and the Four Winds School balance. But it was the Terra Magma School that he was reminded of now. It had trained collectors of unparalleled strength. Was that what Orin meant? The schools may have been disbanded, but the powers they once represented still coursed through collectors of every kind.

  Elias, of course, had only recently ascended and had yet to discover the redrawn boundaries of his own capacity. He was surely strong, but strength was relative here. He suspected Orin was also ascendant, not to mention more practiced and better rested. And “very strong,” apparently.

  “Walk,” Orin ordered.

  And so, once more, Elias walked, only now with a sword to his throat. To add to his discomfort, the rain was pouring like a waterfall. He slipped on a slick stone and nearly into Orin’s blade. Orin pushed him onward. They marched accordingly, abandoning the beach for forest. The evergreen canopy at least offered some reprieve from the downpour.

  Orin was leading him along a different path than the one from which Elias had arrived, keeping them off the main road for obvious reasons. Elias, meanwhile, was searching for an opening. He was not going to step onto that ship: that much he was certain of, though the details of realizing his happy ending were less clear. He was employing the assistance of his sight, but its few faint suggestions flashed in and out of existence before he could ever consider them. Had he already missed his half-second opportunity to escape?

  And then, as they trailed the edge of a shallow stream toward a weathered-looking bridge not far ahead of them, Elias saw another opening: a green line forming to his right, bending toward the water. This one hovered in the air for longer than an instant, and he knew this had to be his chance.

  Elias shouldered Orin as hard as he could. The blond man was a brick wall, but even the best barricade requires a stable foundation. The ground gave out from under him as he stumbled, sending him slipping down the stream’s steep, muddy bank.

  Suddenly, Elias’s sight beckoned him in another direction, and he made the mistake of wondering why. A hand grabbed his ankle. He was on his ass before he could react, sliding toward his captor. The feeling was of a foot being snared by a sinking ship, for Orin had the strength of physics.

  Elias went straight for his pistol and aimed it at Orin’s arm. He did not wish to kill him, only to break the shackle around his ankle, to free himself from a life he hadn’t bargained for. He could not get a steady shot. A gunshot echoed through the forest, and a bullet buried itself in Orin’s shoulder—three inches away from fatal.

  Orin reeled backward from the shot, pulling Elias’s leg along with him. He did lose his grip on the latter man, but not before Elias went flying past him, losing his own grip on his pistol. Elias landed in the stream with a splash, his favorite weapon sinking somewhere in the rushing water. He supposed he would not have had time to reload it anyway. He scrambled to his feet, almost falling in the process. The shin-deep stream was shallow but powerful, feeding off the stormy weather.

  They were facing each other again, both men now standing and worse for wear. Elias had tried for flight, but fight appeared to be his only recourse. He unsheathed his rapier and parrying dagger. “I really don’t want to fight you,” he repeated, but Orin was done talking. The blond collector looked enraged, as if Elias had released a fury inside him that could not easily be put back.

  Orin’s sword arm was still intact, though blood ran down his left shoulder in diluted, watery streaks. He acted unbothered by it, closing the distance between them with the tip of his blade. He took the first swipe.

  Elias dodged it with ease, but Orin rushed him and took another. Elias parried his second attack with the base of his rapier, where he had the most leverage, but only just barely. Orin’s saber was heavier than his comparatively thin sword, and the duelist wielding it was stronger than any man or woman he had ever faced. It undermined sword-fighting logic as Elias had learned it. What might have worked in practice duels with Briley could end poorly for him today.

  He deflected more blows with his rapier, trying to create distance between them. He wielded the longer weapon, though he was afraid to use his parrying dagger. Elias was defending himself more than he was fighting back.

  It was only a matter of time before that strategy was bound to fail him. He noticed the blinding pain before anything else, fearing he had lost an eye. Orin had finally gotten him with a shallow slash across his cheek, though the sharp wound still stung like hell. He grimaced and opened it wider, blood dripping down his chin.

  Elias was increasingly worried he could not win this. He was more powerful than he had ever been, and yet the first man to test that power was making a mockery of it. It was probably a valuable life lesson, but what good were life lessons without the life that followed? He knew he needed to return the attack, but Orin knocked aside each attempt as one might shoo away a pesky fly. Whenever steel struck steel, Elias’s was sent ringing.

  Indeed, Orin was making effective use of his inherent advantage, his impossible strength, and Elias considered that perhaps he would need to do likewise. The problem with this theory was that his particular gift was more difficult to manage. Jalander had told him that the rapier was an “ideal weapon for collectors with the gift of sight” given its long reach and piercing attack. “Use your sight to augment your strikes and parries, but never rely on it,” the elder collector had imparted, but his eager apprentice he had never quite understood that part.

  As the fighting ensued, Elias employed his sight, but in every instance, the second he tried to interpret the path flashing before him, Orin cut it away. He had no time to think, and therein lay the problem.

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  And then, at the precipice of despair, it finally hit him—not a blade but an epiphany. Jalander had told him to think without thinking, to aim without aiming. What had always sounded like yet another one of his occasional mentor’s stupid riddles suddenly crystalized, shining from the recesses of his mind as satisfyingly as the forgotten relic one finds at the back of an emptied drawer.

  His predictive powers were more than mere illustrations in the air. Two years earlier, in the calm moments before The Sleeping Sparrow had flown sideways into a sky rift, Elias had felt something. Months later, he would find the Serpent Moon School headquarters not only with the assistance of a strange letter and an enigmatic riddle but because, once again, a feeling had beckoned him down that frozen alley.

  Instinct did not have the precision of a fine line, nor would it trace a clear course through a sky rift, but instinct had other advantages. Instinct didn’t require interpretation. If Elias kept fighting conservatively, he would slowly lose. He had wielded his sight like a second weapon, and while that may have worked for him before, Orin was too strong. His opponent embodied his power. And Elias—Elias needed to trust in perception more than worried thoughts. You need only follow the serpent’s path, Jalander’s letter had read. But the serpent does not follow its own path. It snakes through time and space.

  And so Elias stopped thinking and started fighting. When instinct tugged him rightward, he dodged right. Green lines flew like sparks across his vision, but they seemed to trace his movement as much as they guided it. He did not give them a second thought. He did not have to. He had found his confidence.

  When Orin attempted another heavy, potentially life-extinguishing swing, Elias rushed forward rather than retreat. He deflected the blow with his parrying dagger in one hand—its blade broke in half in the process—and lunged after him with his rapier in the other. Orin jumped back from the counter as Elias bent his knee into a right angle, extending the reach of his sword. It was a simple move Jalander had taught him that first day they practiced aboard The Sapphire Spirit. The tip of his blade pierced flesh, putting a hole in Orin’s stomach.

  Orin observed the damage. An inch deep. Hardly fatal, but perhaps it would slow the relentless collector. Elias’s wound still pained him, but adrenaline was another instinct keeping him alive.

  Alas, his opponent looked more enraged than ever. His injury had not, in fact, slowed him. His strikes came more hastily than before, pushing Elias farther down the stream as he successfully parried each one with his rapier. It was a tiring ordeal, but Orin appeared equally exhausted. The rushing river was an anchor against every movement.

  Both fighters were soon gasping for air, but Orin was bleeding out. Time was not on his side, and it was increasingly apparent that he knew it. He was trying to end this fight quickly, Elias realized. All it would take was a single connecting strike. If there was one emotion he recognized in others, it was their eagerness, and Orin’s wrath was ravenous. Elias had been too cerebral, but his opponent was growing too unhinged, too instinctual.

  It did have the effect of making him all the more frightening. Elias just needed to not make any mistakes—and to wait for one instead.

  And there it was.

  Orin hacked the air that would have been Elias’s head, but it was an easy dodge—too easy. Elias caught Orin’s forearm with the jagged end of his broken dagger. Orin dropped his sword, screaming in that coarse manner one never intends but that sneaks up on a man unprepared for the sound of his own pain.

  But it was Elias who was caught by surprise next. With his other arm, which was still bleeding from the shoulder but not immobilized, Orin grabbed his adversary’s throat. Elias was too close for rapier work, and so he pulled back—and tripped over a protruding stone in the water.

  Orin fell down with him, both men making a sizable splash, as Elias dropped his rapier in order to catch himself. His dagger, meanwhile, tore free from Orin’s forearm with a crimson comet tail. The larger collector found himself weaponless too, though the smaller one knew his attacker still possessed a lethal strength.

  Orin clambered over top him and reached into the muddy stream to retrieve a cannonball-sized rock. He had intended to bring Elias in, to let his Valshynarian superiors decide an appropriate course of action for the young rogue collector who had traveled across the continent a few hours too fast, but everything in his eyes now suggested he would kill him before remembering purpose or reason. It had become a fight for survival for both of them, and in such fights, only one thing mattered.

  That animal clarity was what allowed Elias, without giving it a second thought, to react to the rock Orin picked up from the creek bed—a rock that, combined with an unnatural strength, could have crushed a human skull in a single blow. Faster than he could think, Elias swung desperately with the broken end of his shattered parrying dagger. It tore a jagged line across Orin’s chest and lodged itself in his thick, muscular neck.

  Orin dropped his stone, if only to clasp the wound gushing blood from his throat. It did him little favor. He was a leaking ship, more blood still dripping from his wrist and shoulder. A normal man would have already sunk into his mortality, though even this one—under his warrior’s paint of mud and blood—was turning pale. Ghostlike, he seemed to fall on his own as he was pushed aside.

  Elias scrambled free, elbow deep in the rushing river, and this time Orin did not follow in his wake. Elias wanted to scream, “I didn’t want this!” He didn’t want this. But he could not bring himself to say anything at all.

  Orin was leaning against the bank, unmoving save for a few desperate breaths, the water around him a red blanket fraying in the stream. Elias sat unmoving, too, as he watched the life drain out of him, meeting the other man’s gaze one last time. There was meaning in that look, though he would never know its message, nor for whom it was intended.

  Elias cupped a handful of water from the creek, splashing his face clean, fresh blood returning on his fingertips. When he looked back up at Orin, even his strained breathing had ceased.

  He was gone.

  Elias had killed him.

  He did not know what to do. For once, he hadn’t crafted some clever plan to pull from, though perhaps nothing could have prepared him for what came next.

  He blinked twice to check that his eyes were not deceiving him. Green lights, as faint as fireflies, rose from Orin’s body, floating like dandelion pappus pulled up in a timid breeze.

  Elias recoiled before regaining his footing. Hesitantly, he approached the supernatural scene. The other thing he could not have prepared himself for was what happened when he stood next to Orin’s body and the lights escaping it. Some of them turned for Elias.

  They flew into his chest and disappeared.

  He jerked backward, but the lights kept swerving toward him, kept swarming his body as if they had found their new home. He did not immediately understand it, and panic was the other unnerving force now coursing through him. And yet he could have run away. He could have tried to escape them. Instead, he stared down and absorbed them all.

  He knew before he knew, of course. That was his gift, after all: knowing the unknowable. As the last light flew into him, he felt at once weakened and yet, beneath that fatigue, stronger too.

  He remembered his dream. “Power is never truly destroyed,” his mother’s voice had told him. “A broken window leaves a trail of shards.” He had only ever imagined the metaphor extended to relics, but what trail would a broken collector leave behind? Elias supposed he had just witnessed the answer to that haunting question. All that power had to go somewhere: back into the world or—

  Into another collector.

  He had never read mention of this mortal mechanic nor heard anything similar from Jalander, though he imagined the subject was a justifiably taboo one. Men had a history of murdering for power, and the Valshynar had a mandate to prevent such men from realizing their twisted dreams. Not that Elias would have committed the act with intentionality. He had crossed lines before, sure, but never this one. He didn’t want a reward for murder, even if it was self-defense.

  No, he really did not want this. He finally managed to say the words when no one was left to hear them.

  There was nothing he could do now, however, except save himself. He had only fought for his survival, for his freedom—he told himself these things again and again—but he wasn’t stupid. No one could know about this, assuming they would even believe him. He needed to distance himself from Orin’s body, though he could not leave it in plain view of a bridge. The storm might wash away blood, but a body needed to be moved.

  The ocean was still nearby, and Elias discovered it again at the end of the stream, its blue canvas poking through the trees as he approached the top of a waterfall where the creek terminated into the sea. It would have to do.

  He retrieved Orin’s sopping corpse from the muddy back and began dragging it through the river. When he found this to be an easier task than expected, he heaved the body over top his shoulder. Even in his current, somewhat damaged state, he had never been so strong. Orin had been an equalizer, but when performing the common tasks of a common man—if carrying a corpse could be called common—Elias’s new strength was anything but. If he had been surprisingly strong as an awakened collector, he was unnaturally so as an ascendant one.

  He arrived at the waterfall, wishing there had been another way, though perhaps those other ways would have ended with him hanging over Orin’s shoulder.

  “Rest well,” Elias told the dead man before tossing him over the misty edge.

  And while he knew the tides would likely return Orin to the shore, hopefully long after his killer had departed this place, Elias—in what could only be described as his version of a prayer—imagined for a moment another destination for the fallen warrior. He imagined that these empty waters might carry him off to that same unknowable place waiting beyond the stars of his youth, to a land of unbounded promise that could only ever exist over the cloudy horizon.

  check out Trial of the Alchemist on Amazon, available as an ebook, audiobook, and on KU. The book recently won third place in a major indie novel competition and also briefly ranked among the 20 best completed stories here on Royal Road. If you enjoy Two-World Traders, it's a safe bet you'll enjoy Trial of the Alchemist.