B2 | Chapter 23: Molten Heart
The quarrel had spilled out from behind the closed doors of their private chamber and into the Gray Academy's central courtyard, where an audience had gathered and now grown. It seemed that everyone was here, including those recently out of breath. As for the collectors who had preceded them, Lucas was positioned on one end, arms crossed, a handful of what looked to be allies behind him, while nearer the building stood Mr. Grimsby, Constance, and High Collector Zylas, the latter man a few feet back from his peers. It more closely resembled an open-air debate than an arrest. The midday sun slipped behind a deep, somewhat ominous cloud.
"It appears we now have a full audience in attendance," Lucas observed. "Perhaps we should see how they feel."
Mr. Grimsby kept his gray-eyed gaze squarely aimed at the accused. "This is not a public forum. We are not reducing your crime to a rhetorical battle of wits. You know precisely what you have done. We have laws, a system built on trust, and you have shattered that trust—as a high collector, no less. We took a chance on you, Lucas, and I am so deeply disappointed it has come to this."
"And you will lock me up now?" Lucas asked, not budging an inch.
Mr. Grimsby was unequivocal. "You will be closely monitored for the foreseeable future and, of course, stripped of your position as high collector."
"Is that your decision?" Lucas emphasized the word "your."
"It is our decision," the elder high collector stated.
Lucas did not take his word for it. "Constance?" Eyebrows raised, his open expression appeared skeptically hopeful, as if creating space for another truth to spill out.
Constance hesitated. Elias had not seen the Serpent Moon high collector more than once since his recent arrival at the academy. She seemed to be the most nomadic of them, though whether that was a product of her sight or just her personality, he could not say. Evidently, Lucas also couldn't read the woman.
"I'm sorry, Lucas," she said slowly. "This needn't be the end of this conversation."
"Only the end of my time as high collector," he replied.
She did not contradict him. And while it was clear she remained on friendlier terms than Mr. Grimsby, Elias wondered whether their friendship could really survive such an impasse. They did not wish to take his life in the most literal sense, sure, but they would strip from it everything that gave that life meaning. Elias was still piecing together precisely what Lucas had done—and what ought to be a proportionate response—but that singular repercussion he understood intimately well. He knew what choice he would make. Had made, once, when he was backed into a similar corner.
"And you, Zylas?" Lucas inquired.
The Azirian collector shook his head and sighed his lips out like an opened drawer.
"You have always been a coward," Lucas said for him.
There was one high collector who did not mince her words, however. "You are a traitor, Lucas," High Collector Redcaller said sternly, halfway between them, standing like a statue among the recently arrived.
And then a voice beside her—one Elias had not expected to hear—asked what many of them were desperate to know. "What is he accused of?" Harriet stepped forward so that her small frame would not be obscured by the taller men and women around her. "We have a right to know."
Lucas was quick to nod an enthusiastic nod, but he was not the only person. Elias agreed—or at least he also wanted to hear the truth of things—and surprisingly, one of his accusers did too.
"Miss Thorn is right," Constance said. "We should tell them. This may not have been the time or way in which we wished to do so, but I don't believe we can delay a discussion that has already begun." She peered out across their unintended audience, the jury of an accidental courtroom.
Mr. Grimsby huffed. Elias had never seen Mr. Grimsby huff before. Perhaps he was unused to being disagreed with. "You are quite right, High Collector Eve. Quite right, indeed." His demeanor changed like the flip of a coin as he turned to the crowd. "High Collector Dawnlight had been actively, if quietly, recruiting within our ranks for a cause that contradicts our most fundamental one. His actions are not merely incidentally fracturing our people and pitting friend against friend, but intentionally so. The crack he has created is not the outcome of a misplaced step, but of a hammer to glass.
"Now, it is his right—even as a high collector—to disagree with any idea he so pleases, and he may voice that disagreement," Mr. Grimsby continued. "But High Collector Dawnlight is inciting a potentially violent revolt. And this, we cannot abide. We inhabit a fragile sanctuary in this modern world, and on a personal note, pursuing power with reckless abandon is an unbecoming quality for a man of his station, especially when he knows perfectly well where it leads. Where it led us before. Lucas has forgotten whom he is meant to safeguard. Not himself, not me, but all of you."
Lucas was famous for his natural smile, but there was nothing natural about the incredulous smirk he forced across his face like a bad patch on a broken hull. "You accuse me of… fracturing our people." He paced as he talked, and it was obvious he reveled in the opportunity to finally speak his truth openly, notwithstanding the circumstances. "I would choose another word. Equalizing. For you see, not even we five high collectors are equals, despite what you are told. It is capital that runs the world out there, and it is the same vault of relics locking away power up here.
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"And whose vault is it?" Lucas asked them. "Well, we all know that one, don't we? It is the vault of High Collector Bartholomew Grimsby, chief proprietor of The Transcontinental Trading Company, the richest man in the world—in more ways than you realize, my friends. More than half of the relics supporting our society come from his venture, and he would tell you that is called generosity. But then why is no one else allowed to be generous? I would love to be generous, but can I start my own company, or acquire another, or find my own creative way of building wealth, power, and security for our people?" He let the question dangle. "Of course I cannot, just as you cannot. Power among the Valshynar is an iceberg, and this man"—he pointed an unshaking finger—"this man controls the bottom of it."
"We cannot further intervene in the world without becoming ever more entangled in its politics." This time it was Constance speaking, stepping ahead of Mr. Grimsby, with whom she had chosen her side. "High Collector Grimsby's wealth was grandfathered in, as you well know, and yes, it is considerable, but we have additional assets, have struck many deals, and have secured revenue sources all across the Great Continent. We may even grow some of them, but they are chosen carefully. It is not High Collector Grimsby you undermine. It is our caution."
"The man who takes too long to fire his gun is the one who receives the bullet," Lucas replied. "We have a fleeting opportunity to secure a stronger position for the Valshynar. There is real safety in power. Why live in shadow as we do now? Why cede the world to others when we have a closer connection to it, to its history? There is a growing relic scarcity. To them, it is just money. For us, it is everything."
Elias examined those around him, his classmates and the others who had run up the hill, wondering on what charges High Collector Lucas Dawnlight could possibly be arrested. Their expressions now were mixed, the most common among them striking a troubled uncertainty that spread from one shared glance to the next. And yet there were as many nods as shaking heads. Elias searched for those he cared about. Keo was unreadable. Dion appeared appalled. And Maria, entertained. But as for Harriet and Caius, did they agree with Lucas? His cause? What about his methods? Elias was unsure. But maybe the even better question was what did he himself think?
"You accuse me of violence when none has occurred," Lucas went on. "If change is the will of our people"—that remained to be seen—"then who is causing the violence? The revolution or the despot?"
Mr. Grimsby weathered his words like a lighthouse in a storm. "You are tragically short-sighted, Lucas. Quick… far too quick. You mask your desire for power with an appeal to equality, and I honestly cannot tell whether you believe it yourself. No other high collector operates without consensus, and yet you accuse yours truly of acting the tyrant. My dear father's advice ever lingers with me: judge a man not by what he says, but by what he does."
A third voice, younger than the ones dominating this discussion, rose from the crowd. "I thought there was room for disagreement among the high collectors," Caius said. "Even if you disagree with High Collector Dawnlight, why must he be arrested?"
"We are not arresting him," Mr. Grimsby insisted. "We are containing the situation and monitoring those involved. And as I already explained to you and everyone else here, Mr. Santori, High Collector Dawnlight is allowed to profess whatever opinions he wishes, but secretly recruiting for a coup is quite another matter."
"I am so tired of pretending we are a council of equals when you write the script that we're all expected to speak from." As he said this, Lucas did not meet eyes with his apparent nemesis but instead looked to the crowd, then to those who still stood behind him. "I was merely offering an opinion to my fellow collectors, something you yourself do quite frequently." He spoke with the tone of an attorney, as if he did not entirely believe in the essence of his claims but, instead, in the legality of them. "Perhaps words do inspire action, Bartholomew, but is that not their purpose? Can free speech exist without free action? Else why speak at all?"
"There is a vast chasm between entertaining an idea and organizing your own army, Lucas." They were both on a first-name basis now. "Your frivolity with words is the very crux of this sad crisis. But I am finished with this. You have spoken your piece."
"Says the king to his subjects." Lucas did not budge.
High Collector Redcaller, however, budged and then some. She marched halfway toward him suggesting he "Come without making a scene."
"Rather too late for that, I'm afraid," Lucas retorted, still unmoving. He looked again to his allies. "Fuck you, Greta. You cannot make me do anything. Look around you. I am not without likeminded friends."
"You are not without accomplices," she said. "We will deal with them later."
"Are you going to force me?" Lucas did not need to flourish the rapier dangling from his hip, nor the flintlock pistol holstered across from it. "Try it."
High Collector Redcaller was armed too, with a heavy saber whose black hilt she gripped as she walked.
And then someone stepped between them, a gangly man not much older than Elias, with deep, hawkish eyes and a menacing intensity in his movements. He unsheathed his own saber and pointed it, hand shaking, at High Collector Redcaller.
In a single smooth motion, she freed her blade and batted the man's away with such force that it spun out of his hand and clanged on the cobblestone near Elias's feet. Lucas's rather daring ally had two seconds to retreat, and it was only two. When his hand inched closer to his pistol instead, High Collector Redcaller's saber flew in the opposite direction this time: across the man's neck.
Everyone gasped.
The man whose fate was suddenly sealed would have gasped as well, were gasping still possible for him. His eyes communicated his shock and terror clearly enough as he collapsed to the ground, then crawled a single foot to his grave, a martyr's halo of blood circling him as his breathing stilled.
A woman in the audience smeared blood across rather than off her face, her hand trembling so.
High Collector Redcaller had always been a woman of stern words, but if anyone had believed age had tempered the Terra Magma collector's true disposition, they were fatally mistaken. She eyed Lucas once more.
But it was not a look of shock and awe she found glaring back. Elias had only ever seen Lucas breeze through confrontations with a characteristic playfulness, as if a joke always lingered under the surface of every supposedly serious situation. But there was nothing of that Lucas left today. He was all sharp edges—calculating, preparing.
And unforgiving.
Unsheathing his rapier with impossible speed, he whirled his blade toward her, letting it fly like some silver arrow. High Collector Redcaller only barely parried what appeared to be a failed attack. But only for an instant. For in the next, Lucas was holding his pistol in his other hand. By the time anyone noticed, the bang had already sounded, the plume of smoke already dissipating to reveal what he had done.
And to whom he had done it. High Collector Recaller stopped in her tracks, ten feet from Lucas, crimson spreading and staining her green and gold chest. She seemed to notice it last, for who would have believed her old, stone heart had a molten core after all? But for all her strength, not even collectors were immortal.