Of Kings and Killers (Elder Empire Sea #3) - WIll Wight Page 0,128

from the remaining shards of sky. A true Elder of Kelarac had arrived.

Which meant the Lyathatan was shirking its duties.

Calder’s Intent filtered through the mark of Kelarac and flowed down into the chains binding the creature to his ship. The Elder reacted. In a human, Calder would have called it a flinch.

It had been hoping that Calder would die before compelling it to fight against Kelarac.

Too bad, Calder thought. Not dead yet.

With a roar of frustration, the Lyathatan broke the surface. Its hands pried two tentacles away from the ship, and it roared again as more tentacles wrapped around its muscled back.

The clash of the two monsters jerked the ship one way, then the other. Petal seized onto Calder for balance.

Calder held her up, though he felt like falling himself. “Sorry, Petal. I don’t—”

She jammed the lip of a potion bottle against his helmet. “Take it off!” she screamed. “Take it off, take it off, take it off!”

He couldn’t resist without hurting her, so he had to give in.

He tore off the helmet and she jammed the lip of the bottle into his mouth. The shining red liquid tasted like alchemical cleaner, and he sputtered some of it up, but she continued tilting it down his throat. As the deck shifted and tossed beneath them, she stood on her tiptoes to make sure he drank every drop.

Finally, she relaxed with the empty bottle as he choked and tried to swallow.

“Could that…pffft....not have waited…two seconds?”

She shook her head vigorously, then pointed to her nose.

Calder raised a hand to his own nose. The tips of his armored fingers came away speckled with blood.

Maybe it had been urgent after all.

He fell to the deck as he gave the potion time to work. Soon his head and vision cleared, and he reached up to steady Petal. “Thank you. Hold on to me.”

She clung to his armor as he stood and took stock of the others. Foster was mopping sweat from his forehead and holding a smoking gun while Andel was seated on the deck with his hat missing.

Calder returned his attention to the battle.

The fight between the Lyathatan and the kraken Elder endured, though it had become quieter. The Lyathatan was holding its opponent underwater with both hands, and if he didn’t know better, Calder would have said it was drowning the enemy.

Beyond that, he saw the flaming wreckage of several enemy ships. The water was dark with Elderspawn corpses, and he saw two Navigator ships listing and taking on water as others approached ready to help.

A black-and-red streak in the distance showed him that General Teach had joined the battle. An Elder that looked like a living mass of coral exploded from the inside out, dying with a furious bestial roar.

All in all, the forces of the Empire looked as though they had things well in hand.

Still further, the battle between Kelarac and the Regents had gone into the distance. Estyr was levitating Jorin and Loreli as well, and every wave of dark energy from Jorin or blow from Estyr’s spikes kicked up ripples across the water. But they had the Great Elder on the defensive.

He could feel Kelarac’s rage pressing in on him, which gave him both relief and a sense of smug satisfaction.

“Kelarac is weaker than ever,” he called to his crew. “I think we have him.”

This was several orders of magnitude less than the might he’d seen from the embodied Urg’naut. Maybe the world wasn’t doomed after all.

For the first time, he felt like he saw the light.

But only for a moment.

On the deck of his ship, the air tore open, revealing the void only a few feet away. Spots of color danced in the darkness, and between Calder and those spots, another wave of Elderspawn poured out.

This time, they were not fish with legs. They were worms.

The spawn of Kthanikahr.

He sliced them and sliced them, reducing them to sludge, but they kept pouring out. His panic rose as he realized the Elderspawn would make it past him and to his crew.

This was the difference between him and a Champion. Urzaia could have stemmed the flow of giant worms all day and laughed while doing it.

A familiar voice paralyzed every muscle in his body.

“Calder,” Jerri said. “They’re not here to hurt you, just restrain you.”

She strode out of the void in a flawless golden dress. Her hair was in a neat braid that reached all the way down behind her, she looked clean and well-fed, and she wore the same